Waste To Wealth: A Way To Circular Economy

Uflex limited has been contributing towards recycling plastic waste since mid-1990s. Here is an overview of their plants.

- Swati Deshpande

Due to the severe problem of plastics waste, today, ‘Recycling’ has become a buzz word. Here is the Indian packaging giant - Uflex Limited which has adapted the mantra of recycling since 1995. Currently, Uflex Limited’s Noida complex houses two kinds of recycling plants: MLP recycling plant and Pyrolysis Plant. The first plant’s end product is recycled pellets while the latter one produces oil.

MLP recycling plant

The company has MLP recycling plant that converts waste material into pellets, which further can be used to make various products. Speaking about the plant, Anil Maitraya, Senior General Manager (Operations), Uflex Limited said, “MLP waste recycling line is capable of recycling numerous materials such as Polypropylene (PP)/ High-density polyethylene (HDPE)/Low-density polyethylene (LDPE)/Multi Layer laminated plastic waste called thermoplastics.”

These types of plastics are the commonly recycled plastic. They are highly crystalline in structure, which makes them of high density, strong & moderately stiff plastic.

As he continued to explain the process of recycling, he mentioned that the process involves collection of waste from the company’s packaging division’s printing/lamination/slitting sections, out of which rolls of scrap laminates are made and collected as a raw material. “The rolls are opened and sent through the Conveyor Scrap feeding belt into the cutter compactor. The Cutter compactor does the shredding of the scrap and helps in densifying it. Once the raw material attains a high level of density, it is fed into the extruder barrel tangentially. The melted waste material then requires de-gassing .”