New Jersey’s G&F Recycling uses optical sorter to recover mixed plastics

Newark, New Jersey-based G&F Recycling was having an issue sorting No. 3-7 plastics at its material recovery facility (MRF). G&F Recycling’s Operations Manager Tiffanie Nyzio says she realized the company could not afford to invest in manual sorters to capture this low-value material, nor could it justify the added expense of landfilling it. Instead, she asked Green Machine, Hampstead, New Hampshire, to improve the company’s sorting of these mixed plastics using its existing Green Machine hyperspectral optical sorter.

G&F Recycling recently installed a high-capacity Green Eye unit to sort the MRF’s high volumes of polyethylene terephthalate (PET). The MRF’s existing five-year-old Green Eye was relocated after the new sorter to recover high-density polyethylene (HDPE). In an effort to solve G&F’s problem, Green Machine set out to program G&F Recycling’s older Green Eye unit to positively sort out Nos. 3-7 plastics while leaving HDPE to be hand-sorted farther down the line.

Green Machine’s Optical Engineer Specialist Neal Eason led the research and development effort at G&F Recycling’s MRF. “Green Machine’s patented Green Eye hyperspectral optical sorter is essentially a high-speed spectrophotometer utilizing patented hyperspectral artificial intelligence,” Eason says. “The machine can be trained to differentiate and separate a wide range of different plastic polymers, as well as other materials, individually or all at the same time. Giordano’s Green Eye is now programmed to sort No. 3-No. 7 plastics and a variety of other materials.”

Eason says that with the adjustments, G&F Recycling is now able “to produce highly marketable bales of No. 3-No. 7s.” He adds, “This reduced their labor and cut down their residue disposal costs.”

Green Machine says its Green Eye hyperspectral optical sorters also can identify and separate sorted office paper (SOP), old corrugated containers (OCC), old newspapers (ONP) and other types of fibers; wood; textiles; aggregates; auto shredder residue (ASR); and e-scrap.