NGR Review business year 2013/14

Innovative equipment developments are opening new applications for plastics recycling. This past financial year was marked by several customized solutions for specific sectors. NGR expanded the E:GRAN series by adding the E:GRAN 75, an innovative model designed to recycle film edge trim at a rate of up to 120 kg/h and thus keep pace with increasing film production speeds. HDPE pipes in sizes up to DN450 can be recycled automatically into high-quality pellets with a pipe-guillotine and a combined shredder-feeder-extruder system. The total number of systems in operation worldwide thus rose to more than 720.

Much potential raised and market-orientated further developed. "The positive tailwind in the plastics recycling industry, as well as consistent and competent focus on technological innovations and the expansion of global sales activities, produced this impressive result," states Josef Hochreiter, CEO of NGR. The introduction of the new lines of equipment has been received positively by the market and the broadly-based product portfolio is popular with clients in the area of customized recycling solutions. With the opening of the new Customer Care Center in Taicang, China, test runs can be performed quickly and locally in Asia. Together with the existing Customer Care Centers in Europe and USA, NGR can now assist customers to their individual recycling-success with more local and closer engineering attendance.

Next Generation Group is pressing ahead with the conversion from a linear economy to a circular flow economy. With its recently acquired controlling interest in Dr. Collin GmbH (Feb. 2014), NGR plans to develop further as a reliable partner for the entire range of services in the plastics recycling industry. The close cooperation at present with plastics manufacturers, processors, recyclers and compounders will be expanded – under the motto of "plastics for the next generation." 

Starting the new fiscal year with the promising LSP process. Half a year now, we completed the process development phase for liquid state polycondensation (LSP) for recycling of PET. With this process, intrinsic viscosity (IV) values can be improved in just a few minutes. In addition, the process provides excellent cleaning efficiency. (The FDA awarded NGR a "no objection" certificate.) This project is performed in a PET reactor, which can be connected with the combined shredder-feeder-extruder systems and thus allows for recycling of fibers, PET pre-forms, bottle flakes, etc. In the next few months, we will perform field tests with selected users. Launch of sales is planned for the start of 2015.

Source: NGR