Complete Process of Foam Material Recycling & Pelletizing Machine
During the production of foam products and biodegradable plastics, a large quantity of PLA, PET and PS foam trimmings and waste products will inevitably be generated in workshops. Direct discarding will not only raise various environmental disposal costs for enterprises, but also lead to severe waste of raw material resources. Therefore, mature waste foam recycling equipment is essential for manufacturers. The PLA foam recycling machine developed and manufactured by Keli Machinery can realize one-stop regeneration processing of all kinds of foam waste. The whole production line features coherent working procedures and high automation without manual material transferring, meeting the cyclic reuse demands of multiple foam materials.
Waste foam trimmings, broken disposable food containers and plastic board scraps produced during production are firstly conveyed into the crusher. The crusher is equipped with a specially optimized shredding structure for light foam, which can fully crush massive hard plastics and fluffy foam materials while avoiding material flying during crushing. The crushed uniform scraps are then delivered into the extruder through closed conveying channels. Independent temperature zones can be set for PLA, PS, PET and other materials respectively. The machine heats evenly to melt and plasticize scraps, and a low-temperature melting zone is specially configured for polylactic acid which is prone to hydrolysis under high temperature, so as to retain the physical properties of recycled pellets to the maximum extent and perfectly match the waste recycling demands of the PLA foam sheet extrusion line.
After plastic scraps are fully melted into uniform melt, continuous and regular plastic strips are extruded through special dies. The newly extruded high-temperature strips are immediately sent into a cold water tank for cooling and shaping to prevent adhesion and deformation. After shaping, the strips are pulled forward at a constant speed by a traction unit, whose speed can be flexibly adjusted according to actual output to ensure uniform thickness of all strips.
Water vapor adheres to the surface of water-cooled strips, so the strips need to be sent to an air-drying device to completely remove residual moisture via strong wind. Fully dried plastic strips are then fed into a high-speed pelletizer and cut by evenly rotating blades to produce PLA recycled pellets with uniform particle size, which finally fall into collection bags automatically.
The integrated plastic recycling and pelletizing machine realizes fully automatic continuous operation covering crushing, melt extrusion, water-cooled traction, air drying and pelletizing. The produced recycled pellets have stable quality and can be sent back to foam production lines for secondary processing. It builds a green closed-loop production chain of raw material production, finished product processing and waste recycling, which significantly reduces procurement costs of virgin raw materials and conforms to the global trend of resource circulation and low-carbon environmental protection.