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2006-06-01 News Headlines

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Amcor PET Packaging chooses Sortex Sorters for French PET recycling venture

One of the world's largest packaging companies has chosen to include Sortex Sorters as a key part of their French based PET recycling plant.

The state of the art Sortex Z3 mono sorter will play a vital role in the pivotal recycling process at the heart of Amcor's European operation.

Amcor is a leading worldwide operation with companies and plants in Australia, North America, Latin America and throughout Europe. They are the world's largest manufacturer of PET containers. Amcor specialise in packaging and packaging related services – also including the production of flexible plastic packaging, specialty printed cartons, closures, and the distribution of packaging products. In Australia and New Zealand, Amcor has an even broader packaging offering.

PET containers are plastic containers made from Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET), which is a plastic manufactured from various by-products of the oil and gas industries.

PET containers are used for a broad range of products including carbonated soft drinks, water, juices, sports drinks, milk based beverages, dressings, spreads, spirits and beer.

With 70 plants globally, Amcor make over 32 billion such containers every year and in a world that is becoming increasingly ecologically conscious, Amcor recognise that PET offers a major environmental benefit, it is easily recycled.

It is predicted that there will be 1 million tons of post-consumer PET collected every year in Europe by 2010, and in the UK alone last year, over 700 million PET bottles were recycled to produce fibre filling, clothing, pallet strapping, carpeting and containers, thus drastically reducing the amount of raw material required in the manufacturing process and greatly alleviating the burden placed on land fill sites.

It is this re-cycling ethos that Amcor have whole-heartedly embraced at their European production plant at Ste Marie La Blanche near Dijon. Here they test and develop product lines and improve the quality of recycled PET products and the production process.

Key to this plant is the recycling process - from discarded bottles to re-processed raw material, that is ready to be turned back into usable products.

Bales of post-consumer bottles are brought to this site to be sorted, cleaned and crushed before being turned into recycled PET pellets, from which new containers can be manufactured.

Essential to this process is scrupulous cleaning and the removal of the foreign bodies which can easily contaminate the material brought for recycling. Also essential, is the sorting of the PET flakes into colour shades - transparent, light green and blue.

It is here that Amcor have turned to Sortex. The bottles to be recycled are delivered to the plant where they are first washed and then ground into small particles (so-called Flakes). These flakes must now be decontaminated and sorted by colour. Previously dust filters and magnetic sorting was used to help cleanse the product but aluminium contaminants could not be removed by magnet and the filtration system was easily blocked, requiring regular maintenance and the daily replacement of up to 11 filters per machine.

After extensive testing over a 3 month period, Amcor were convinced that Sortex had a better solution. They installed the Sortex Z3 mono sorter on their high capacity production line, just after the washing process. The results were remarkable. The sorter was easily able to colour sort 1.5 tons per hour and to remove contaminants, such as wood, rubber, metal and other foreign bodies and to separate clear, green and blue flakes.

The data produced by the Sortex sorter is equally impressive - there are now less than 20 contaminated particles per million in the production stream after sorting and less than 0.2% of good product ends up in the reject stream.

The result is a significant improvement in cost of production. There is less maintenance, less energy is used and the final product is less degraded by contaminants (such as rubber, aluminium, wood…) during the melt phase in the extrusion process.

Frederic Blanchard, director of Amcor PET Recycling has this to say: 'The Sortex sorting machine has made significant difference to our production line. Amcor is an ecologically friendly company and we are vigilant in our concern for health and the environment. The use of the Sortex sorter in our recycling plant has produced benefits that go far beyond our own company and into the wider community, of which we are very proud.

Buhler Technology Group is a leader in the basic technologies of grinding, blending & mixing, bulk handling, thermal treatment, and shaping for processing cereal grains and foods, producing and upgrading engineering materials, and die casting.

Find Information and Suppliers for plastics recycling.

Read a recent press release from Buhler about - 'The Buhler Technology Group awarded the renowned European food technology innovation award for a process that revolutionizes rice processing.'

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