Plastics group honors recycling technology pioneers

Recoup, a United Kingdom-based trade group focused on plastic recycling, has announced the nominees in the “Best Innovation in Equipment or Technology” category of its 2024 Recoup Awards.

The awards will be presented in Peterborough, U.K., in late September and are sponsored by European waste and recycling firm Remondis.

The nominees include a reverse vending machine (RVM), a recycling rewards program, an online platform and an automated sorting device focusing on discarded containers.

The CauliKiosk by London-based Cauli Ltd. is an RVM collection box for reusable plastic items used by restaurants and at food service locations.

The Polytag Rewards for Recycling program uses QR codes on packaging to “enhance product traceability, improve supply chain efficiency and boost consumer engagement,” according to U.K.-based Polytag. Among the customers using the system is Ocado Retail, an Sweden-based online supermarket.

The third nominee, London-based Ellipsis Earth Ltd., has developed technology to track plastic distribution over a wide geographic area. According to its LinkedIn page, Ellipsis Earth also produces media content.

The nominee with the potentially largest impact for large-volume recycling plant operators is the GAINnext optical sorting device now available from the Tomra Sorting Recycling business unit of Norway-based Tomra Systems ASA.

Tomra has marketed the GAINnext in part for its ability to identify and sort aluminum used beverage cans (UBCs), the highest-value discarded container. However, if polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles and other plastic containers can maintain and build their value, GAINnext has clear applications in that sector.

GAINnext uses deep learning technology—a subset of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning—to identify different types of containers on a moving belt. The firm says it offers a high-throughput solution for UBC aluminum recovery that delivers 98 percent purity or higher without manual sorting.

“This breakthrough technology further automates the sorting line to improve UBC capture efficiency [at material recovery facilities (MRFs)],” the company adds, potentially increasing revenue and decreasing costs for plant operators.

The technology has been designed to instantly detect and eject non-UBC materials including aluminum bottles, food cans, trays and plastic containers to accomplish high-accuracy, automated sorting of aluminum cans.

“MRFs typically rely on manual sorters at the end of the line to pick UBCs from the metal packaging waste stream,” says Ty Rhoad, vice president of sales for the Americas at Tomra Recycling. “Manual sorting averages approximately 60 picks per minute, but our highly effective GAINnext AI sorting application offers up to 33 times more throughput. Offering high purity, GAINnext is proven to reduce operating costs and increase revenue and productivity, resulting in a quick return on investment (ROI).”

GAINnext has been developed as an end-of-line solution for MRFs that can be integrated into existing lines with the object of lowering overall costs and improving sorting line ROI.

“Tomra’s experience with AI spans decades as our optical sorting equipment leverages traditional AI to automate sorting lines,” says Indrajeed Prasad, product manager of deep learning at Tomra Recycling. “GAINnext is trained to see what the human eye can see and detects thousands of objects by visual differences in milliseconds.

“The deep learning subset of AI creates a hierarchical level of artificial neurons to solve the most complex sorting tasks. We are delighted that our new application focuses on the critical recovery of UBC aluminum cans and offers customers above 98 percent purity rates.”

The device uses an RGB (red, blue, green) camera, trained by thousands of images, to recognize UBCs based on shape, size and dimension.

Tomra says GAINnext can make up to 2,000 ejections per minute and the deep learning software identifies overlapping objects and calculates positioning for high precision.

The company is deploying deep learning in other sorting applications, having used GAINnext initially in the European market. It has sorted food-grade from nonfood-grade plastics, including PET, polypropylene (PP) and high-density polyethylene (HDPE) at high throughput rates with purity levels it says have reached 95 percent.

Globally, Tomra has approximately 105,000 installations in more than 100 countries.

More information on the September Recoup Awards program and the full-day Recoup Conference in Peterborough that will follow can be found here.