Tomra unveils material circularity initiative Retility

Norway-based Tomra Systems ASA is offering a response to the scrap infrastructure dilemma of how to recycle and reuse industrial black plastics in a closed loop through a new initiative called Retility.

The value chain collaboration was set up to effectively recycle materials from retired Tomra reverse vending machines (RVMs), while also providing access to quality recycled content for use in the production of new Tomra technologies.

Tomra says the initiative will contribute to its goals of ensuring at least 90 percent of the materials and components in new products are sustainable, and at least 50 percent of its products are circular at their end of life by 2030. Additionally, the company says this open-access ecosystem can help other manufacturers in pursuit of their own circularity targets.

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Working with the European Recycling Platform in Norway, Tomra says its RVMs are responsibly decommissioned at end of life. During disassembly, a range of black plastic parts are presorted by polymer type before being passed to Polykemi, an industrial plastics compounder based in Sweden, to be recycled in a quality-assured material stream. From there, the recycled content is sent to Tomra’s existing injection molding partners to become new polymer parts.

“We encourage all relevant producers to join this ecosystem and join us in driving the resource revolution forward,” says Marius Fraurud, head of Tomra Collection. “We would be glad to offer our insight on this initiative and facilitate any necessary connections between stakeholders.”

Tomra says this process not only enables it to achieve full circularity across a range of polymer components found in its products, which facilitates the sorting and recycling of more than 46 billion used beverage containers (UBCs) globally each year and also provides an opportunity for other producers of black plastic-based hardware to achieve the same.

“We hope that this initiative will result in a vast amount of valuable black plastic being diverted from incineration towards recycling, while unlocking greater access to recycled content for our peers across the technology and manufacturing industries," says Christina Ek, head of sustainability at Tomra Collection. "At Tomra, we have a saying that there is no such thing as waste. Retility is about putting that into practice. We are excited to explore even more opportunities to deliver on our product circularity goals.”

The challenge of black plastics

Tomra notes that different plastic polymers are suited to different applications. It says that while flexible compounds could be effective for making plastic bags, compounds with stronger structural qualities could be a better match for molded items.

However, Tomra says a blend of these compounds might not perform well in either application, meaning that the composition of any polymer compound must be reliably documented to ensure it meets the needs of its specific application.

To enable this, sorting technologies are used to separate different polymer types from one another and keep material streams pure, meaning recyclers can be confident of the composition of material going in and coming out of their recycling processes. While this is a common practice for clear and colored compounds, Tomra says black compounds present a challenge.

A common method for making plastic black is to mix it with carbon. Black polymers notoriously are difficult to recycle as they are not recognized by many available sorting technologies and could present a barrier to keeping each polymer type’s purity high enough to guarantee the desired physical properties are maintained in the new recycled compounds. As a result, Tomra says carbon black polymers typically are incinerated.

The company says applications of black polymers are overwhelmingly found in computer and mobile technology, where up to 60 percent of the associated plastics are black, and in the automotive industry, where about 90 percent of plastics are colored black.

More information about the Retility project can be found here.