After almost a year of construction, 12 January saw the opening of the new sorting plant for lightweight packaging in Eitting, Bavaria.
Built by PreZero, a Schwarz Group company, the plant, with a sorting capacity of 120,000 tons of lightweight packaging a year, is located on the site of the facility of waste management company Wurzer Group within the scope of the strategic partnership between the two organisations. The project involved an investment of some € 40 million and has created 50 crisis-proof jobs.
At the facility, the collected packaging material is sorted into a total of 18 different fractions, according to type of plastic, including polypropylene, polyethylene terephthalate, polyethylene and polystyrene and by color. Using the latest detection technology and innovative separating units, manual sorting can be largely dispensed with.
Equipped with black scans, enabling even hard-to-sort black plastics to be processed and sorting robots to support employees with quality control and re-sorting, the fully-automated plant, with the help of artificial intelligence, the fully automatic sorting plant will ultimately operate 24/7, 365 days a year. It will meet and exceed the sorting quotas prescribed by law under the Packaging Act adopted in 2019.
The commissioning of the new plant offers a logistics benefit as well, by closing a geographical gap: from the location in Eitting PreZero’s recycling plants in Austria and Italy. “In future, they will be able to access material that has been processed according to type and use it for subsequent production processes,” said Christian Kampmann, Head of Business Unit Sorting.