Page 61 - Plastics News June 2024

BUSINESS NEWS

TOMRA achieves worldwide industry first with groundbreaking

food-grade plastics sorting solution

eading global sorting solu- rate. Hygiene concerns and increasing- today. And the degrees of purity that
tions provider, TOMRA Re- ly stringent industry regulations add a this solution is achieving – upwards of
cycling, has announced the further layer of complexity to handling 95% for the packaging applications in
launch of three revolutionary food waste in recycling. customers’ plants across UK and Eu-
applications to separate food-grade AUTOSORT™ with GAINnext™ com- rope – will open up opportunities for
from non-food-grade plastics for PET, bines object recognition with tradition- new revenue streams for TOMRA’s
PP and HDPE. The breakthrough was al sensor-based sorting customers.
made possible by the company's in- TOMRA is also launching two non-
tensive research and development in However, TOMRA’s GAIN technol- food applications that complement
deep learning, a subset of AI. ogy – today rebranded GAINnext™ to
pay tribute to the product’s significant the company’s existing GAINnext™
Thanks to TOMRA’s continued invest- evolution – resolves all of these chal- ecosystem: an application for deinking
ment in GAIN – the company’s deep lenges by further enhancing the sort- paper for cleaner paper streams, and a
learning-based sorting add-on for its ing performance of the company’s PET cleaner application for even higher
world-renowned AUTOSORT™ units – AUTOSORT™ units so they are capa- purity PET bottle streams.
it is now possible for the first time to ble of identifying objects that are hard Bottle-to-bottle quality
quickly and efficiently separate food- and, in some cases, even impossible to
grade from non-food-grade plastics classify using traditional optical waste Dr. Volker Rehrmann, EVP, Head of
for PET, PP and HDPE on a large scale. TOMRA Recycling, comments: “We
sensors. have used AI technology to improve
Until now, food-grade sorting has Purity levels of over 95% sorting performance for decades, but
proved a real challenge for the industry this latest groundbreaking application
as food and non-food packaging are By combining its traditional near-infra-
often made of the same material and red, visual spectrometry or other sen- marks another industry first for us.
visually very similar which makes it sors with deep learning technology, AI has the power to transform resource
difficult for any sorting system on the TOMRA has developed the most ac- recovery as we know it, and our lat-
market today to differentiate and sepa- curate solution available on the market est sophisticated applications of deep

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June 2024