As the suitability drive gains urgency in the mountain of waste, plastic infested oceans, negative CO2 footprints. The recycling solutions have gained increasing importance within the textile space. The first virtual Virtual Fibre Congress in Dornbirn with a session that focuses specifically on the topic. Markus Reichwein, the head of Product Management at Oerlikon Barmag addressed these very issues in front of 400 participants and provided solutions to tackle them.

Oerlikon Group’s manmade fibers segments offer the entire mechanical recycling chain. They are the only manufacturers providing an end to end recycling unit from preparing the recycled materials, producing the melt all the way through to the textured package. Here the company has utilized the VacuFil solution supplied by its subsidiary Barmag Brückner Engineering (BBE). This is an added advantage to mastering bottle-to-bottle and bottle-to-textile processes. The company has also managed to process textile waste into chips. This is in line with the company’s zero-waste philosophy.

The contamination removal is essential for a stable and efficient spinning process and outstanding yarn quality. It is just as important to conduct stable operation conditions with minimal fluctuation. The greatest challenge here would be the differing quantities of the bottle flakes put into the system, this is because the extrusion system process is barely able to balance these fluctuations. At this stage, the output will be high-quality yarn and fabric as the VacuFil concept counters with blending silos which reduce the differences in the viscosity of the polymers to a great extent.

The VacuFil concept is installed upstream to an Oerlikon Barmag POY system, which converts recycled melt into high-quality filament yarns. The yarn manufacturers wishing to continue manual texturing can utilize eFK series.

VarioFil R+ facilitates the producers of smaller batches to also have a compact system with an integrated recycling preparation unit at their disposal. This system provides a special extrusion system for bottle flake materials which is a 2 stage melt filtration system. 

As technology has improved mechanical recycling, chemical recycling for mixed fabrics is still a huge challenge. Oerlikon Group’s Manmade Fibers segment is presently working on solutions and concepts for transforming these fabrics into new textiles.