PETpla.net Insider 04 / 2019

MATERIALS / RECYCLING PET planet Insider Vol. 20 No. 04/19 www.petpla.net 42 Sesotec sorting systems at New Zealand’s first PET recycling plant Tackling PET recycling 20,000 tons of virgin PET is imported to New Zealand annually. New Zealand government’s Waste Minimisation Fund supports the project to reduce that environmental harm. A grant enables the parent company Flight Group Ltd to open New Zealand’s first PET recycling plant in Wellington and spend NZ$ 12 million (US$ 8.8 million) on a full upgrade at its facility including a wash plant for PET bottles. Flight Group was established in 1907 and initially made leather lug- gage. It is still privately held by mem- bers of the original Osborne family owners. Flight moved into plastic production in the 1970s. It also has PET product manufacturing plants in Adelaide, Australia, and Romsey, UK. Keith Smith, CEO of Flight Plastics Ltd in Wellington said the wash plant and other work at the facility enables Flight Plastics to produce thermofor- med packaging from recycled PET bottles. The company installed extru- sion equipment to use recycled PET flakes starting in 2014, using imported flake to prove the process and estab- lish a customer base. They had very encouraging results, so the next step was to install their own wash plant. Flight Plastics has the capacity to recycle 6,000 metric tons of PET a year. It gets feedstock from kerbside collections around the nation, which collect about 8,000 t annually. Sorting bottles and flakes As a part of the investment in a wash plant, Flight Plastics installed a multi-sensor sorting line including two bottle sorters and a flake sorter. These three systems secure the output quality as well as a continuous supply of PET flakes to the production line. After the upstream process steps such as bale breaking the bottles are fed to Sesotec‘s Varisort MN multi- sensor sorting system. This system was installed for the separation of PET bottles from other polymers (near infra- red sensor N) as well as metals (metal sensor M). Flight Plastics also decided to install a further Varisort CN. This second Varisort is equipped with colour sensors C and near infrared sensor N for material identification and sorts as well as cleans the PET bottles into a transparent clear and a coloured frac- tion. Those sorted bottles are fed into a cutting mill where they are cut to the desired flake size and passed through a washing and drying process. In the next step Sesotec‘s Flake Purifier multi- sensor-sorting-system is used for a final cleaning of the PET flakes. Here the remaining off-colours, wrong polymers and small sized metal pieces will be removed. This multi-sensor configura- tion equipped with a high resolution out- blast system is claimed to allow highest possible sorting efficiency combined with lowest possible material loss rates. Depending on the application the three sensors can be used individually or in combination. www.sesotec.com Sesotec‘s Flake Purifier multi- sensor-sorting- system is used for a final clean- ing of the PET flakes. Flight Plastics installed a multi-sensor sorting line including two bottle sorters. Recycling Special