Biffa, a leading integrated sustainable waste management company in the United Kingdom, has set a target to quadruple its plastic recycling by 2030, and its polyethylene terephthalate (PET) recycling plant in Seaham, located in County Durham, England, has been designed with this in mind. The plant has the capacity to process 57,000 tons per year, the equivalent of 1.3 billion plastic bottles each year, and has been supplying recycled material to Nestlé Waters’ Buxton factory since 2021.
State-of-the-art plastics recycling facility
This nearly $35 million (27.5-million-pound) plastics recycling plant opened in January 2020. It is equipped with a 4,000 kilogram-per-hour PET bottle sorting and washing line as well as additional infrastructure and equipment, providing the capacity to recycle 57,000 tons of PET per year.
Biffa invested in cutting-edge equipment, making this one of the world’s most advanced bottle-to-bottle recycling plants and, in January 2022, the facility received food-grade status from the European Food Safety Authority, allowing Biffa to achieve customer acceptance and sign various agreements for supplying food-grade recycled PET (rPET) pellets.
A global sorting solution from bottle to flake
Italy-based AMUT Ecotech supplied the PET recycling line for the Seaham facility while France-based Pellenc ST and Switzerland-based Bühler were chosen to equip the site with optical sorters.
Pellenc ST had been reappointed by Biffa to provide sorting at the bottle stage after installing optical sorters at four of its other sites. The five optical sorters at the Seaham facility carry out the material and color sorting and eliminate contaminants to recover the purest possible stream of clear PET.
At the flake sorting stage, Bühler installed four machines to sort flakes by color, remove labels, metal, other foreign materials and non-PET polymers to obtain a final quality that meets food-grade standards. With the announcement of a partnership in 2022, the two companies now offer a global solution to meet the sorting needs of PET recyclers—from bottles to flakes.
“With an oriented-performance approach shared by both Pellenc ST and Bühler suppliers, we quickly reached the requested food-grade quality.” Martin Brass, Regional Engineering and Projects Manager at BIFFA POLYMERS
Supporting clients in their performance quest
With increasing volumes and growing complexity of materials to be recycled, plastics recyclers demand more and more in terms of quality. The challenge for optical sorting suppliers is to provide technological solutions and services that can help customers optimize their industrial performance by guaranteeing their availability rate and the best possible purity.
With a joint vision of the customer relationship, Bühler and Pellenc developed a digital business solution to make the most of the data at their disposal and turn it into resources for their customers: Sortex Monitoring System powered by Bühler Insights and Smart&Share for Pellenc ST.
Both applications are real performance support tools and provide valuable statistical data insights on key performance indicators, including contamination, yield, throughput and machine health.
