"The quality is simply perfect!". That is how Dejan Simic, owner of the Serbian plastic waste processor Brzn Plast d.o.o., assesses the recycled pellets produced by his company since July 2022 using the new INTAREMA® TVEplus® technology from EREMA. Brzn Plast processes LDPE and LLDPE film collected from household waste in the Balkan countries. The recycled pellets are used 100 percent in the company's own blown film line for the production of PE film. The majority of their customers are in the construction industry.

Brzn Plast processes exclusively post consumer film waste. "We don't consider this to be waste, but raw material which we can use again to make high quality products, so it doesn't need to end up in landfill or being incinerated," says Dejan Simic. "Of course that only works with the right technology, which we found in terms of extrusion at EREMA." The technology in question is the patented INTAREMA® 1714 TVEplus® extruder system with double filtration, which is in a class of its own when it comes to recycling heavily contaminated, damp material that would otherwise be difficult to process.

The input stream that Brzn Plast recycles following automatic sorting and washing, has a moisture content of up to ten percent. Due to the effectiveness of the drying in the preconditioning unit, where the material is crushed, mixed, heated, dried and precompressed, there is no need to add so-called moisture catchers and the throughput can be maintained at a constant 1,500 kilograms per hour. That is one of several cost saving factors. Another, which is even more significant, is the drastically reduced energy consumption compared to operating their old recycling machinery. Simic says that energy savings are around 20 to 25 percent. And finally, the top quality of the recycled pellets also saves costs because they can be processed so smoothly in the blown film line that five percent less production waste is now generated during film production. Film is produced in thicknesses of 35 to 500 µm and most of their products are supplied to the construction industry.