The industrial activity of MASER (Trapagaran, Bizkaia) focuses on processing the plastic mixture from the recycling of electrical cable waste by applying wet and dry separation processes to recover PVC, PE and copper fractions.
The unique characteristics of MASER’s industrial facility lie in the fact that it combines pneumatic and electrostatic separators and allows the processing and recycling of other complex streams of plastics and metals generated in and around the Basque Country. These fractions are currently not being recovered due to the lack of adequate processes and they are therefore sent to landfill.
Examples include streams from the management of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE), including cables, from the shredding processes of end-of-life vehicles and other scrap; mixtures of rubber and plastics; plastics with metal inserts; plastics from window waste; shredded printer toner cartridges, both the complete stream and the plastic fraction; plastic fractions of different origin such as PE/PP from packaging caps or ABS/PC and other post-industrial fractions from the automobile industry.
Objectives and lines of action.
The main objective of LEHORTUTA is to demonstrate the technical, economic, environmental and commercial feasibility of MASER’s new dry separation processes to treat complex plastic fractions (other than the flow of electrical cables) generated by waste managers in the Basque Country. The aim is to recover waste plastics efficiently as secondary raw materials, with suitable quality that promotes their circularity toward industry.
The project therefore seeks to avoid the landfill disposal of complex streams of mixed plastics and to demonstrate on an industrial scale the technical and economic feasibility of the new processes. It also identifies commercial outlets for the new fractions of recovered plastics, thus diversifying MASER’s commercial portfolio. In addition, as part of the project, the environmental benefit of MASER’s new dry separation processes will be evaluated from a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) perspective.
Participating companies and funding.
The LEHORTUTA project, led by MASER, has the cooperation of the Gaiker-BRTA Technology Center and ZICLA. LEHORTUTA has been supported by the Basque Government’s Circular Ecoinnovation Grant Program, and managed by IHOBE the Basque Government’s public company for Environmental Management in its 2021 call for proposals, which is financed with ERDF funds.
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