Extrupet’s facility is located in the Wadeville district of Johannesburg, South Africa, on a dedicated site measuring approximately 32,000 sq mtrs. Its capacity is earmarked to be increased from 12,000MT of bottles per annum to 26,000MT per annum by 2010. The process commences by receiving pre-sorted bottles in bale form with bales weighing on average 250kgs each. A fully integrated debaling, bottle prewash, autosort, and grinding system has been designed, built and installed by Sorema Plastic Recycling System of Italy.

Extrupet’s use of NIR (Near Infared) autosort technology is the first of its kind on the African continent. Plastic bottles are automatically sorted by polymer types as well as by colour. This has enabled us to drastically improve the quality of our end product while simultaneously allowing for an increased volume of bottles to be processed.

PET Flakes from the grinder are pneumatically transported to a custom designed washplant, purpose built in Europe for our specific requirements. A sophisticated wash system is used to wash the flakes to improve their purity prior to extrusion.

Extrupet employs three extruders in total, two of which are manufactured by Erema in Austria. A sophisticated automatic backflush filtration system is employed to ensure high quality levels on the end product.

To ensure strict quality control Extrupet have in house a state of the art laboratory capable of testing ppm, iv, colour (amongst others) levels thereby ensuring compliance with customer requirements.