Come in bottles, jugs, containers, bags. And, after passing through several machines that the criban, washed and shredded, leaving small spheres of plastic, lentejitas of different colors. Raw material for the manufacture of new objects. The transformation takes place in one of the plants of the company Recycled The Network, located on the outskirts of Seville. The process explains Carmel Fair, its director-general, in that the business comes from family: it belongs to the fourth generation that is devoted to the treatment of waste, an activity which was launched by his great-grandfather in the municipality of Alcalá de Guadaira. Those were other times. “Today’s companies, founded in 1994, before the entry into force of the law on packaging [in 1997],” she recalls. “Fortunately, things have advanced and changed so much.”
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The campus smells like chemicals and you hear a continuous hum. There’s full activity. “We work all days except holidays”, it indicates Just, that wanders freely between conveyors, trucks and bullets stuffed in containers. Of an estimated 85,000 square meters, in this complex are processed 100,000 tonnes of plastic per year, collected by a fleet of 60 trucks that operates in Andalusia, the area of the Levante and Castilla-La Mancha. Several plants employ about 500 people and each one processes a different material: HDPE (the classic bottle of detergent), PET (the bottle of water) or film post consumer (shopping bags), among others. Broadly speaking, the treatment is the same for the different fractions.
The director takes as an example explaining the plant where it is regenerated HDPE (high density polyethylene), the hard plastic of the big bottles of bleach, in the spread over the site about 50 employees and hundreds of machines. As if it were a recipe, Carmel Just details the journey of these residues to the renaissance: “The first thing we do is to remove the unfit, as it can be a label that has been cast. After, we separate those bottles by colors using robotics, and several employees control the quality of the selection. Grind the containers, washed them, dried them, and the melted. Depuramos that material, whether liquid, with filters, and solidify with cold water. The result is a spaghetti that we cut in lentejitas, what we call screening”. This screening will come new packaging, pipes, or textile fibers, among other applications. In the process, he adds, there are no additives and reuses all the water used.
The main customers of Recycled Network are large business groups, shopping centres and distribution companies, although they also work for management. “Any logistics company produces a residue. In the unpacked, in the manufacturing process. All these wastes carry to our plants and what we process through our own resources,” he explains. Your business is the last link in the recycling chain that begins with the simple action of pulling a container in the yellow container. “The challenge is not only in the collaboration of the society. Is that the citizen must demand that you consume recycled materials” closes.
