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Italian mineral water company Ferrarelle will install an Amut, Italy, washing technology that will produce up to 3,000 kg/h of flakes recycled from post-consumer PET bottles. The company will use flakes suitable for food application thanks to a re-gradation process. The high-quality and purity rPET flakes will be processed directly to produce preforms and final bottles. After the bottling process, the new generated bottles will reach supermarket shelves.

“Under full production process, we expect to exceed our annually preform in-house requirement – around 700 million a year,” says Pietro Bortone, plant manager of the Ferrarelle Presenzano plant. 

Once bottles bales are opened and sent to the constant feeder, a detector performs an initial selection to separate bottles from contaminants before the washing phase. 

The bottles are conveyed to the Delabeller-PreWasher, a patented machine working in dry process for both labels removal and first cleaning action. The dry process also reportedly reduces the energy consumption. Two NIR detectors for color/metal separation take care of final sorting and purify the stream from any non-PET material.

The flakes will be washed with Amut patented technology—turbo washer and friction washer—to carry out a strong cleaning action to remove all fine pollutants and glue. The combination of these machines allows the treatment even in the case of highly polluted bottles, achieving a reported excellent results in term of final product quality and output.