Schroll Group, a family-owned waste management and recycling business founded in 1892 and located in eastern France, built its first Stadler sorting centre in 1999. Since then, the relationship between the two companies has thrived, with Schroll commissioning another 5 sorting plants from Stadler, as well as putting the company in charge of renovating another facility.
Stadler, an internationally recognised specialist in the design, production and assembly of sorting systems, recently delivered its latest sorting plant to Schroll at the new recycling centre at La Maix, in the Vosges near the town of Épinal. The multi-material system has a capacity of 15 tonnes per hour, or 80,000 tonnes of waste per year.
“The positive experience … encouraged us to work again with this company,” said Vincent Schroll, co-owner of the Schroll Group, commenting that Schroll was especially satisfied with ‘the reliability of the machines, the respect of deadlines and the work of the Stadler teams’.
At the new plant, the waste is first fed into a Stadler PPK ballistic separator and two STT2000-8-1 ballistic separators for mechanical sorting. It then passes four near-infrared (NIR) devices for optical sorting, which is followed by the last - manual sorting - stage. The final output fractions of this line are PCNC (packaging and small cardboard fractions), cardboard, film and JRM (newspapers, journals, magazines), as well as hollow materials which are then fed into the plant’s second sorting line.
The hollow materials line, with a throughput of 4 tonnes per hour, again sorts the fractions mechanically, optically and manually, yielding an output of clear and coloured PET, PEHD, Tetrapak, aluminium, film, mixed paper and residual fractions.
The complex project was delivered on schedule in spite of a very tight timeline of just 14 weeks, including a week for the start-up of each of the two lines, and the facility started operation in October 2019.