Author: Mark Ruesink | Director of Production & Innovation of Morssinkhof Plastics
More than 10 years after Diolen's yarn spinning machines were stopped, new polyester yarns are rolling out of the 'spinning street' in Emmen. Here, Morssinkhof Plastics works together with partners from the Netherlands and Germany to develop yarns from rPET: recycled polyester.
Soft drink bottles from deposit systems form a relatively clean feedstock for this. This enables us to make quality yarns. But it is by no means trivial, because even small contaminants can have major consequences. Yarns are made up of thin threads; 210 filaments. Only a particle of a few micrometers needs to be in the polymer for your wire to snap. This makes it necessary to use extreme filtration and tweak the process settings to get the yarns to the right strength, to give them certain properties and, if necessary, to color them.
Due to all the pre-processing, our yarns are more expensive than those spun from virgin PET. But also because rPET polymer is still scarce. And we spin on a small scale, compared to the major world producers from the Far East, who produce hundreds of thousands of tons per year. This competition killed the production of PET yarns in Europe at the beginning of this century. We are currently the only European party that still makes them. But with a much smaller carbon footprint because recycled PET polymer is used. In this way we demonstrate that high quality and sustainability go very well together!
The project has been running for a few years now and we are now moving from the pioneering phase to the phase of developing applications together with customers. For example, durable and flame-retardant carpet yarns for floor coverings. One of the promising new applications is SR tape: self-reinforced tape. This allows us to make extremely strong sheet materials from 100% recycled polyester that contain yarns and which are also 100% recyclable. That is something very new on the market and could well become a hit!
Morssinkhof Plastics works in the INTERREG VA project Bio-Economy-Green Chemistry / Sustainable Fibers together with NHL Stenden, Faserinstitut Bremen, Cumapol, Senbis Polymer Innovations, MJBC and Fond Of.
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