Flake sorter identifies and sorts to meet high purity level for food grade recycled PET flakes

29-Jul-15

Recycling companies have traditionally struggled when it comes to meeting the high purity levels demanded by customers for food grade recycled PET flakes. To address this challenge, Tomra Sorting has developed an Autosort flake sorter that combines a visible range spectrometer camera to detect color and non-transparent contaminants, a near infrared spectrometer to detect different polymer types and a metal sensor to detect ferrous and non-ferrous particles. The Autosort flake sorter is capable of identifying and sorting flakes as small as 2 mm. The Autosort unit is capable of detecting and separating out white opaque PET bottles and PET trays. The Autosort unit can also be used to achieve 100 percent recycled content clear foils. After the Autosort separates out the case PE foils from the other in-feed material, the contamination is then targeted to remove all fines and improve the purity of the end fraction, as per www.environmentalleader.com. Tomra has developed another unit to separate food and non-food PE. The unit uses an extended wavelength scanner to detect the difference between and separate the homo (food) and co-polymer (non-food) material. It effectively separates two polymers within one polymer group. Purity rates on both end fractions of close to 100 percent are achievable