Waste management company Iren has started operating Italy’s largest plastics sorting plant in Borgaro, near Turin.
Germany-based sorting machinery manufacturer Stadler designed and built the 100,000 tonnes/year plant, called Circular Plastic.
Iren invested €45 million to build the new plant. It can automatically sort 17 types of plastics, aluminium, and ferrous materials. The sorting process delivers high-quality output, returning up to 80% of input materials to the recycling loop, according to Stadler.
The Circular Plastic plant separates incoming material into three streams: bulky, medium size, and fines. The bulky material is screened with a special model of Stadler’s STT5000 ballistic separator, which ensures a better separation of film which is then furher sorted in a sorting cabin.
The plant includes a line dedicated to fine material after it is extracted by Stadler trommel screen and ballistic separators. On this line, the fines are processed through a magnet separator and eddy current system to extract all the ferrous material and aluminium, then treated with a Stadler trommel screen and two optical separators to recover small plastic components such as bottle caps.
The medium-sized material is split into two lines for 2D and 3D separation, each with a Stadler STT5000 ballistic separator, whilst fines are sent to their dedicated line. The 2D stream goes through six optical separators to sort films into PP, PE, and bio-film.
The 3D stream is cleaned of ferrous materials, then separated with optical sorters into clear PET, blue PET, coloured PET, opaque PET, and trays. Further optical sorting ensures additional automatic quality control and cleaning of these products. In parallel, HDPE, PS and PP fractions are sorted on a second line. The output of the two 3D lines comes together for the extraction of clean aluminium particles.
All residual materials from the 2D and 3D lines go through a second sorting process, fed into optical sorters to recover any valuable materials left, which are then sent to a bottle recovery line. This line is equipped with a bottle opener, a dedicated ballistic separator, and a material dosing system to guarantee maximum recovery.
“Circular Plastic is a truly impressive facility with all its machines and optical sorters,” said Flaviano Fracaro, technical director at Iren Ambiente. “What we appreciate most is the layout's space management, with walkways that make all the machines accessible and the entire plant easy to navigate, ensuring excellent access for maintenance. Additionally, thanks to the various management systems for operators, it is very easy and intuitive to control and manage the entire facility.”
Stadler had to study how to optimise space and distance in order to assemble all the machines in the available space, accounting for future maintenance and upgrading.
“During the assembly phase, the challenge was coordinating more than 100 people from 20 companies to assemble the plant and all auxiliary systems,” Paolo Cravedi, senior project manager at Stadler, explained in a statement. “Finally, once the plant was assembled, we had to ensure it could manage the high incoming material flow of 20 tonnes per hour, that the line had the mechanical capacity to process this inflow without material blockages or plant stops and deliver the very high level of quantity and purity of all outgoing products,” he concluded.