How we deal with plastic waste
Target of Bänninger at the production of pipes and fittings from various plastic materials the target of Bänninger is a resource sparing manu-facturing.
Plastic waste is reused whenever possible to protect the environment and improve our sus-tainability. Most of the waste occurs when start-ing up after tooling or changing a batch of gran-ulate material. Due to this the production plan-ning covers this aspect in order to avoid unnec-essary waste. But waste can also arise after production, such as the sprues that were creat-ed during injection molding that are removed in rework. Part of the new design of fittings and moulds is the reduction of such waste.
Further-more fittings which had been in the quality in-spection are plastic waste. The waste materials are delivered “sorted” to our processing service provider, ground and “re-granulated”. The re-granulate (reprocessable material) is processed again by us. Due to the high requirements concerning hy-gienic aspects and lifetime to fittings and pipes for gas and water supply as well as drinking water installations the use of reprocessable ma-terial is strictly limited.
The use of re-granulate ( reprocessable material ) for such as PE fittings is not allowed according DIN EN 1555-3 as well as DIN EN 12201-3 as the high requirements on the reliability can only be achieved by virgin material. Among other things, we use regranulate to manufacture our auxiliary products, such as the support ring, which protects thin walled PE fit-tings against deformation.