Extrusion International 3-2025

20 Extrusion International 3/2025 INDUSTRY NEWS Closed Loop: How Often can the Material Travel in a Circle? While mechanical recycling has long been established, new process- es such as solvolysis and other chem- ical recycling processes raise many questions – and offer great oppor- tunities. Legal requirements and customer expectations are increas- ing the pressure on the industry. The SKZ is actively pursuing these challenges – in research as well as in training and further education. Material recycling is widespread in the plastics industry – the re-melted sprue saves raw material costs and conserves resources. However, tradi - tional remelting has its limits: Mate- rial changes and the accumulation of foreign substances mean that plas- tics cannot be recycled as often as required. The legal definition of “re - cyclate” (Section 4 (1) KrWG) is also becoming increasingly precise and calls for more advanced solutions. When filtration and degassing are no longer sufficient, new ap - proaches are needed. Recycling processes based on physical prin- ciples such as the dissolution of polymers offer promising alterna- tives here. Chemical processes that break down polymers into oligo- mers or even monomers are also in- creasingly coming into focus. How - ever, research in this area is still in its infancy in many places - as is the transfer of knowledge. Research at SKZ: Recycled materi - als from textile fibers and PET bot - tles At the SKZ Plastics Center, re - search is being conducted into sol- volysis processes under the leader- ship of Theresa Forster, Scientist Compounding and Extrusion. These enable the depolymerization of polyesters - not only from PET bot- tles, but also from textile fibres. “Our aim is to develop new raw material sources for polyol-based adhesives,” says Forster, who is investigating how such processes can be continuously transferred to extruder screws as part of the IGF project ‘RezyBond’ (“PET recyclate as a multifunctional raw material for polyol-based adhesives”, fund - ing code 01IF22951N). The SKZ Plastics Center Mathias Ruckdeschel m.ruckdeschel@skz.de Advanced recycling is attracting great interest (Source: Adobe Stock 1034260904/Nattapun) Innovative Solutions for the Optimization of Web-Processing Processes Increasing demands on quality, ef- ficiency and sustainability are driving digitalization in the web-processing industry. At ICE Europe 2025 in Mu - nich, BST presented innovative solu - tions to make production processes smarter and more efficient. BST presented the latest developments in the areas of web guiding, surface inspection, web monitoring and 100% inspection. The trade fair ap - pearance was complemented by a presentation at the ICE Conference, in which BST showed how technical networking is revolutionizing the in - dustry and giving companies a com- petitive edge. With SMARTData, BST presents its 2nd generation workflow, which further increases the quality of web processing, simplifies work pro - cesses and automates them across all processes. SMARTData inte - grates seamlessly into existing pre- press and MIS systems and enables centralized control and analysis of production processes. The data is stored in a modern database with a RESTful API and can be synchro - BST COATINGControl® ensures perfect alignment of the coating positions using line scan or CIS camera technology with minimum space requirements. Maximum control accuracy is achieved thanks to robust edge detection (Picture: BST GmbH)