As the largest supplier of high-quality food-grade recycled PET (rPET) in Europe, APPE meets the high standards set by its Joint Venture partner Coca-Cola Enterprises, by using the POWERSORT 200 system from Unisensor.
The packaging expert, who covers the entire process chain from bottle sorting to pre-forming in their PET recycling plant in Beaune, France, has again chosen the high-performance system from Unisensor. The sorting system Powersort 200 is based on laser spectroscopy and has proven its value to APPE, where it has been used for PET recycling since 2010.
The Powersort system identifies the material in a plastic flake stream based on its specific opto-electronic spectrum or “finger print”, and separates the good material from the various foreign materials such as PVC, nylon, silicone, multilayers or blends in only one step. Up to 1 million spectra are recorded and analyzed per second. Due to its high resolution, the system recognizes even the smallest foreign particles and then ejects them efficiently with highly precise air nozzles.
The new production line installed as part of the Joint Venture, will increase the SuperCycleTM capacity of the recycling plant in Beaune by 70 percent, to 48,000 tons per year. Thus, not only is APPE the largest company in bottle-to-bottle recycling in Europe but is also one of the largest bottle-to-bottle recyclers in the world.
Stefan Münch, Technical Director at APPE, explains: "The installation of the first Powersort system in October 2010 led to a significant improvement of the product quality. The decision to add one further Powersort 200 in 2013 allowed us to maintain our high quality standards for the increased volume created by our Joint Venture Partner”.
