MATERIALS / RECYCLING PETplanet Insider Vol. 22 No. 10/21 www.petpla.net 28 Tomra Recycling opens new test centre in Italy by Ruari McCallion September 21 saw the offi cial opening ceremony of Tomra Recycling’s latest test centre, located in Parma, Italy. The company says it will use the facility to develop new applications and solutions for polyolefi n and PET fl ake sorting and offer testing and demonstration services to its customers. Parma is a two-hour drive down the Autostrada from Milan. One reason for choosing the city as the location for the new centre is because of its good communications. “Parma is in the middle of a cluster of airports that put everywhere in Europe and the Mediterranean area in reach within two hours, including Turkey,” said Alberto Piovesan, Plastic Segment Manager EMEA & Americas in Tomra Recycling. It is also conveniently placed for Italy’s cluster of food packaging machinery companies, as well as big European recycling plant builders. Testing, development and demonstration The session was hosted by Fabrizio Radice, Head of Global Sales and Marketing at Tomra Recycling, and Tom Eng, Senior Vice President, Head of Tomra Recycling. Fabrizio gave an infectiously enthusiastic and charismatic introduction to the new centre and explained its role as part of Tomra’s research and development activity, as well as a demonstrator. “We use this facility and equipment to develop the software, hardware, monitoring systems and tools,” he said. The opening event was presented under the banner of ‘Testing is Believing’. The allusion to the more familiar phrase that ‘seeing is believing’ seems to be deliberate. Tomra’s sorting equipment rely on optical sensor technology for sorting and purifi cation of fl akes of different polymer types, colours, and with different material and colour impurities. The company’s operations include reverse vending solutions (RVMs) for ‘clean loop’ recycling, collecting aluminium, plastic and glass beverage containers for recycling into new bottles and cans; sorting technologies for mineral processing and mining; and grading, sorting, peeling and analytical technology for the food industry, as well as metal and waste sorting solutions in Tomra Recycling. Common technology “The common technology is sensors,” Tom Eng explained. “Optical equipment and optical technology are what Tomra brings to the process of fl ake sorting.” There is a high and rising demand for high quality recycled material and the challenge is to take input material with increasing levels of impurity and turn it into high purity output product, according to Alberto Piovesan. As a result of this, the effi ciency demands of the fl ake sorting machines has increased signifi cantly in a short period of time, from a typical 85-87% performance in PET to 95-97% for PP and PE. Tomra’s fl ake sorting portfolio includes two machines: Autosort Flake and Innosort Flake. Autosort Flake, which is designed for highend applications like PET bottle-tobottle recycling, incorporates Tomra’s Flying Beam NIR (near infra-red) sensor with 2mm resolution, as well as full-colour RGB camera, and a highly sensitive metal sensor, which can detect ferrous and non-ferrous metals down to 1mm in size. When asked whether this was sensitive enough, Product Manager Recycling Ida Semb explained that smaller particles – including paper – would have already been removed from the fl ake mix earlier in the sorting process by screening and windsifters. Ribbon cut by Tom Eng (Senior VP, Head of Tomra Recycling - in the middle), framed by Robert Glaser (left) and Fabrizio Radice (right) Fabrizio Radice, Head of Global Sales and Marketing, Tomra RECYCLING
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