BIFFA'S PLASTICS RECYCLING PLANT
PET SORTING FROM BOTTLE TO FLAKE
Biffa, the leading integrated sustainable waste management company in the UK, has set a target to quadruple its PET recycling by 2030. The plastics recycling facility at Seaham, County Durham has been designed with this in mind. The plant has the capacity to process 57,000 tons per year, the equivalent of 1.3bn plastic bottles each year and supplying recycled material to Nestlé Waters’ Buxton factory since 2021.
STATE-OF-THE-ART PLASTICS RECYCLING PLANT
This £27.5m Biffa’s plastics recycling plant, opened in January 2020, and is equipped with a 4,000kg/h PET bottle sorting and washing line along with additional infrastructure and equipment, providing it with the capacity to recycle 57,000t of PET a year. Biffa invested in cutting-edge equipment and is one of the world’s most advanced bottle-to-bottle recycling plants. That’s why, in January 2022, the facility received food-grade status from the European Food Safety Authority enabling Biffa to achieve customer acceptance and sign various agreements for supplying food-grade recycled PET (rPET) pellets.
A GLOBAL SORTING SOLUTION FROM BOTTLE TO FLAKE
Concerning the process, AMUT Ecotech supplied the PET recycling line for the Seaham facility and Pellenc ST and Bühler were chosen to equip the process with optical sorting machines.
Already present at 4 of their sites, Pellenc ST has been reappointed by Biffa to provide sorting at the bottle stage. The 5 optical sorters carry out the material and colour sorting and eliminate contaminants to recover the purest possible stream of clear PET.
At the flake sorting stage, Bühler is responsible for sorting. 4 machines sort flakes by colour, remove labels metal, foreign materials, and non-PET polymers to obtain a final quality up to food grade standards. Indeed, with the announcement of a partnership in 2022, the two companies can now offer a global solution to meet the sorting needs of PET recyclers, from bottles to flakes.
With an oriented-performance approach shared by both Pellenc ST and Bühler suppliers, we quickly reached the requested food-grade quality.
SUPPORT CLIENT IN THEIR PERFORMANCE QUEST
With increasing volumes and growing complexity of the materials to be recycled, plastics recyclers are more and more demanding in terms of quality. The challenge for optical sorting suppliers is therefore to provide technological solutions and services that can help their customers optimise their industrial performance by guaranteeing their availability rate and the best possible purity.
With a joint vision of the customer relationship, the two partners developed a digital business solution to exploit the data at their disposal and turn it into resources for their customers: Sortex Monitoring System (SMS) powered by Bühler Insights and Smart&Share for Pellenc ST.
Both applications are real performance support tools and provide valuable statistical data insights on key performance indicators including contamination, yield, throughput, machine health…
