A partnership between meals waste disposal agency Swancote Power and recycling gear producer TOMRA Recycling marks the primary UK software of optical sorting expertise in an anaerobic digestion facility.
In 2021, the agency invested in an AUTOSORT® unit from TOMRA Recycling at its AD facility in Bridgnorth, Shropshire. It produces vitality from a mix of economic meals waste and purpose-grown vitality crops. CHP turbines convert the biogas into electrical energy and warmth, with the electrical energy fed on to a neighborhood aluminium smelting firm.
The AUTOSORT® unit is enabling Swancote Power to recuperate recyclable plastic packaging from industrial meals waste which might then be used within the manufacturing of recent food-grade plastic packaging.
The plant’s infeed stream contains of palletised meals waste from multi-national meals producers, retailers, distributors and small impartial companies. Many various kinds of meals waste are processed on the plant, together with unfastened, liquids and palletised. The infeed stream comprises a variety of packaging supplies resembling plastics, tins and glass.
Swancote Power makes use of quite a lot of completely different mechanical and automatic processes to recuperate all recyclable merchandise for recycling, together with glass, tin cans, aluminium merchandise and plastics.
The agency can now course of 50,000 tonnes every year of palletised meals waste whereas making certain the inflexible plastic packaging – together with HDPE, PP and PET bottles, tubs, trays and pots – is all recovered for resale. The natural matter is eliminated first earlier than the fabric goes via a scorching wash previous to being optically sorted. The AUTOSORT® unit is the ultimate stage within the technique of depackaging of the meals. As soon as recovered, the recyclable plastic packaging is bought on to food-grade plastic recycling amenities.
The AUTOSORT® combines close to infrared (NIR) and visible spectrometers (VIS) to recognise and separate completely different supplies in keeping with their materials kind and color, extracting high-purity high-value finish fractions. At Swancote’s facility, the unit is programmed to focus on and kind inflexible plastics by color and polymer from the infeed stream, with the goal fractions being HDPE, PP and PET.
