Mechanical Recycling Enhancement

Products for a Restorative and Regenerative Circular Economy

We combine pioneering ideas with engineering know-how to deliver solutions that are tailored to the needs of your end application. Our products help facilitate the replacement of non-recyclable materials with PET and/or rPET and maximize the content of recycled materials, so that you can meet, exceed or even be ahead of the European recycling content targets. Explore our portfolio and support a circular economy in the plastics industry.

Discover Our Product Portfolio

Melt Viscosity Enhancer

Due to degradation, recycled polymers exhibit low viscosity, which narrows the processing window. This leads to inconsistent processing and negatively affects product quality.

SUKANO® Melt Viscosity Enhancer improves the rPET resin production and rPET quality for converters. In addition, our masterbatches enhance the IV of rPET, ensuring stable processing and superior film quality. By integrating our product directly into your processes, you can significantly increase the rPET content in your end applications.

For recyclers, it enables a higher starting intrinsic viscosity (IV) of rPET, allowing you to shorten the Solid State Polycondensation (SSP) process. This means faster production times and reduced energy consumption. 

The masterbatches lift the IV of rPET resins to improve mechanical performance and process stability of the material. This enhances rPET quality and makes increased rPET content possible.

Color Correction

Recycled polymers often have a yellowish tint due to degradation caused by exposure to UV light, oxygen, heat, and impurities in the recycling stream. This discoloration affects the applications’ shelf appeal. Add SUKANO® Color Correction masterbatches during processing to address this issue and prevent discoloration.

Our products absorb UV light and re-emit it as visible blue light, neutralizing the visual effects of heat history and impurities, thereby enhancing the material's appearance. You can choose from a range of masterbatches that correct colors from greenish-yellow to yellowish-red. Our technicians can evaluate the optimal product grade and dosage through lab trials with your specific resin or blends.

Our Color Correction masterbatches counteract discoloration for converters using recycled materials. This enables the use of higher amounts of recycled content in the final application without compromising shelf appeal.

Antioxidant

Prevent yellowing of your recycled resins. During mechanical recycling, polymers often undergo thermal and oxidative degradation, leading to discoloration. This effect may intensify during further processing. To counteract this, SUKANO® Antioxidant masterbatches are added to stabilize the material, ensuring better retention of mechanical and optical properties.

Our Antioxidant masterbatches protect polymers from thermal and oxidative degradation during processing and mechanical recycling, enhancing the color and visual appeal of the material throughout its lifespan.

Transparent Impact Modifier

Increasing recycled content in end applications often leads to brittleness. While Impact Modifiers can counteract this, common solutions typically result in a loss of transparency.

SUKANO® Transparent Impact Modifiers address both challenges by reducing the brittleness of rPET while maintaining its transparency. They enable high-resistant mono-material recycled and virgin PET structures that are suitable for cold, flash frozen, and room temperature applications.

By enhancing the toughness and impact resistance of rPET, our masterbatches allow for higher rPET content in end applications. This is achieved without compromising on transparency, ensuring the integrity of the clear PET recycling stream.

Our Impact Modifiers increase impact strength of the material, enabling higher production output. Moreover, recycled content can be increased in the end application while maintaining virgin material properties.

NIR-Detectable Black and Colors

Some colorants absorb visible and near-infrared (NIR) light, interfering with the NIR detection, a technology widely used by recycling facilities to sort polymers.

SUKANO® NIR-detectable blacks and colors preserve the characteristic NIR peaks of the plastics, ensuring the detectability of black and colored post-consumer materials. This facilitates the sortability of transparent, white, colored, and black PET, thereby improving the circularity of PET by keeping the material in the loop. Additionally, reliable sortability and separate recycling enhance the quality of the different recycling streams.

Our portfolio includes a range of COTREP-certified colors and blacks, tested by sorting machine technology leaders in France. 

Ensure high sorting efficiency in recycling facilities with our colorant selection that is free of carbon black and other ingredients that impair NIR detectability of parts.

Compatibilizer

Engineering resins are not yet recycled at scale, which poses a challenge for companies that rely on the properties of these materials, and still aim to reduce the carbon footprint of their applications. The incorporation of post-consumer recycled PET can help achieve carbon reduction goals. However, rPET is not inherently compatible with engineering resins.

This is where we come into play. SUKANO® Compatibilizers make engineering resins compatible with PET, enabling the use of rPET content in the final application while preserving its mechanical properties. By using rPET in your consumer durables applications, you can significantly lower the product’s environmental impact compared to using virgin engineering resins.

Compatibilizers ensure compatibility between PET and engineering resins, helping to increase rPET content while maintaining the mechanical properties of the application. Thus, Compatibilizers help reduce the need for virgin materials, enabling applications to have a lower environmental impact.

In-House Testing Capabilities

Collaboration to Guarantee Recyclability

Design for Recycling

We work together with PETCORE EUROPE and follow their Tray Circularity Evaluation Platform (TCEP) and the European PET Bottle Platform (EPBP) protocol. Additionally, we adhere to the APR design guidelines to ensure end applications containing our masterbatch are bottle-to-bottle and tray-to-tray recyclable before we offer them to our customers and the market.

Ensuring NIR-Detectability

We closely collaborate with sorting equipment manufacturers to test our NIR-detectable color masterbatches according to the COTREP protocol. This way, we confirm that end applications containing our masterbatches can be sorted effectively in recycling facilities that use NIR optical sorters. In addition, we have a portable NIR device that allows for quick and confident validation of NIR detectability of masterbatches and end-applications. 

Explore Your Material Options

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