It’s every purchaser’s dream: your company has access to a supply of recycled – and therefore eco-friendly – raw materials that ideally also come with a more advantageous price-performance ratio than comparable new materials. At Melos GmbH in Melle, near Osnabrück, we’ve been gradually approaching this ideal for decades: with the very latest compounding technology.
The primary reasons for this success are the comprehensive expertise, experience and consulting services offered by Melos. “A lot of companies,” says Business Development Manager Herbert Baur, “give a great deal of thought to whether they could make better use of their waste plastic. Does it really have to be thrown away, or could it be recycled and put to some good use in the company’s production facility?” Any difficulty answering this question usually has its source in a lack of good advice. Or as Baur notes, “Company representatives are often not aware that new raw materials can be added to this waste to improve its properties, and that entire new areas of application can be opened up this way. And because of this, they miss valuable economic and ecological opportunities.”
Practical example: floor covering
That this type of complex material redesignation is no longer an impossible dream is amply demonstrated by the flooring industry. For years the company has been reworking shredded flooring offcuts to new granulates that the manufacturer can reuse in the production process. During its manufacture, a process known as “compounding”, the shredded offcuts are supplemented with additional raw materials and other chemicals to produce a new, homogeneous material that matches the company’s more extensive requirements profile. Similar concepts are also already being used in the cable industry, where Melos reprocesses waste from start/stop of extruderlines to gain an original raw material for subsequent use.
Baur cautions, “It takes comprehensive testing and analysis in our development lab to establish whether the waste is suitable for a new application.” Most of all, it takes experts who can estimate the subsequent financial and logistical costs of such a redesignation. As Baur notes, “It is this competence in the search for individual customer solutions that really sets us apart from conventional recycling enterprises. They frequently just shred the waste or render it down to a standard mix. Preferably in black.”
Machine made
And what happens at Melos GmbH when some waste material does prove suitable for reworking? “That depends on the end objective and the purchaser,” explains Herbert Baur. “We develop individual formulations in our lab and then manufacture the material in our production facilities, which are equipped with internal mixers with discharge extruders or twin screw extruders. The core element of this production is what is called “compounding”: here an ingenious technical process adds further raw components, stabilisers and chemical supplements to create the precise new material desired. In the end its primary advantages are the price and the material properties, which are comparable to those of a new product. The excellent price-performance ratio is possible thanks to Melos’ optimised production processes and machinery that is precisely tailored to the specific product. Baur explains: “A rigorous expansion of our machine capacity has enabled us to achieve annual production figures of up to 65,000 tonnes.”
At Melos, the management is no doubt about the further expansion of the company’s recycling business: “If the prices for primary raw materials continue to rise, this will heighten the pressure on prices in the plastics industry and the proportion of recycled material will therefore increase”. A statement that can be documented: since 2004 Melos’s revenues have been growing by 20% per year on average. With positive side-effects: less waste and more environmental protection!
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