Case Study: Wastebeater

摘要

Titech has developed an optical sorting system that can recover wood from a mixed C&l waste stream. The system achieves a very pure wood fraction by using twin NIR sensors to examine different parts of the spectrum and has been installed for the first time in the UK at Wastebeater's C&l MRF in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Over the last five years, Wastebeater's Belfast MRF has witnessed significant changes in the composition of the C&l waste stream. The waste entering the plant has become much lighter and now contains greater quantities of plastic film, paper, card and rigid plastics. This has had serious implications in terms of materials sorting, as the original technology was not extracting all the potential value from the waste. Kieran Byrne, managing director of Wastebeater, explained: "We knew there was a strong market for clean recycled materials, so we wanted to develop a sorting process that would allow us to derive high value, high purity fractions from the waste. We investigated all of the possibilities and decided that optical sorting would be the most effective." The company was able to demonstrate how its technology worked in a number of different applications at different sites, including C&l waste sites in Europe, and the results it could achieve for different fractions.