Regulatory change demands innovation
Under the Circular Economy Law, France has set an ambitious target of recycling 100% of plastics by 2025. To achieve this, consumers nationwide received instructions to sort household packaging waste into separate paper/carton, metal, and plastic bins. To meet the demands of these regulatory changes and increase the volume of recycled plastic content available to the market, NPP initiated a project with TOMRA’s Recycling division in 2022.
Even with conventional sorting technologies, creating a pure recyclable PET fraction was challenging due to hard-to-detect plastic contaminants, such as multilayer packaging. Milk bottles in France, for example, are often composed of multiple layers of different colored plastics, with the outermost white layer containing titanium dioxide that provides UV protection. While producer responsibility organizations like the French Eco-emballages have called for reducing opacifying colorants in PET1, these materials are abundant in waste and need to be separated from the target fraction using the most advanced sorting technologies.
Partners join forces
Together with the research and development engineers at TOMRA, NPP tested the deep learning-based application for purifying PET on their sorting lines. TOMRA software engineers trained the AUTOSORT™ with GAINnext™ deep learning technology to detect opaque PET objects, foils, textiles and films that are considered contaminants when producing rPET.
“With our GAINnext™ application, we have targeted the separation of white opaque PET from clear PET, which was previously difficult to solve with traditional technology”, explains Amed Tuwi, Application Developer - Deep Learning at TOMRA Recycling Sorting.
As project leader for the new GAINnext™ application, Tuwi commented: “NPP is a highly recognized and forward-thinking player in the industry. They were a great collaborative partner to test our PET Cleaner application on an industrial scale, allowing us to make it available to the entire market.”
Following this successful collaboration and additional testing, TOMRA launched its PET Cleaner application for GAINnext™, along with other solutions such as food-grade vs. non-food-grade plastic sorting applications, to the global market in April 2024.
