The granulator line: where end-of-life HDPE goes

About 6% of incoming totes have bottles that can't be reused. They go to our granulator line. Here's a walk-through.

Step 1 — separation. First, the cage, pallet, and gasket get pulled. Cage and pallet go back to reuse stock. Gasket goes to a small accumulating bin (we sell scrap EPDM and Viton to a local rubber recycler). Lid and valve are usually intact and get pulled for parts inventory.

Step 2 — bottle wash. End-of-life bottles still need to be cleaned before granulation, because residual chemistry contaminates the regrind. A heated rinse cycle (140°F) flushes anything that's still in the bottle. Wash water joins the main reclaim loop.

Step 3 — feeding. Bottles get fed into the granulator one at a time. The granulator is a rotating-blade shredder with a ~30 mm screen. Output is HDPE flake.

Step 4 — float-tank wash. The flake goes into a float tank. HDPE floats; most contaminants (paper labels, residual non-HDPE plastics, dirt) sink. The clean flake gets skimmed off the top.

Step 5 — dry. A short rotating dryer with low-heat air takes the flake to <0.5% moisture. Wet flake fouls the extruder.

Step 6 — extrude and pelletize. Single-screw extruder with a 50 lb/hr throughput melts the flake, pushes it through a die, and a rotating cutter chops the strands into pellets. Pellets cool on a conveyor and drop into a 50 lb bag.

Step 7 — sale. Pellets go to one of three regional molders we have standing supply agreements with. They use it for: drainage pipe (the most common), agricultural irrigation, automotive trim, and (full circle) new IBC bottles.

Audit trail. Every batch of pellet has a traceable origin: which day, which tote intake, which prior contents. Buyers can request the trace if they have specs that require it.

What we don't do: ship overseas. Don't sell to brokers we can't audit. Don't blend with material we don't know the origin of. The Reclaim Pledge is the long version of this.

Throughput: about 50 lb of pellet per hour, 500 lb per shift, ~120,000 lb per year. That's the equivalent of about 2,500 dead bottles' worth of material kept in the polymer pool annually. Small numbers compared to industrial recycling, but tightly traceable and 100% North American, which is the part we're proud of.