PROJECT NEWS: Partners visit Pellenc ST Factory

Pellenc_sorting

With over 20 years of experience, Pellenc Sorting Technologies (Pellenc ST) is recognized as a leading company in the design and manufacturing of intelligent sorting equipment for waste and recycling. As part of the 5th General Assembly meeting of the SEALIVE consortium, project partners were invited to visit the Pellenc ST factory in Pertuis, France.

It was an excellent opportunity for project partners to see some of the practical steps necessary for applying circular economy principles to waste management.  Based on advances in spectrometer technologies, the Pellenc ST facility uses optical sorting techniques to sort and separate biodegradable plastics.

The Pellenc ST team demonstrated pilot examples of several waste sorting processes, including:

• Using sensors to identify and detect different packaging samples on a static conveyor belt.

• Dynamic sorting of waste items by extracting items containing a specific polymer, (HDPE), out of a standard packaging stream. The modern optical sorters at the Pellenc facility can extract and separate several tons of the desired packaging type per hour.

• Dynamic sorting of two different SEALIVE products (square boxes made in the same material that will be used for the SEALIVE fish crates, and flexible films). We’ve shown that bioplastics developed in the project can be separated from other waste types and therefore will not impede the recycling of other polymers.

• Dynamic separation of two SEALIVE products from each other. This demonstrated the potential for separating different biodegradable plastics so that they can be diverted to different end-of-life options such as composting and recycling.

Moving on from the pilot processes, SEALIVE partners also had a tour of the Pellenc ST assembly lines where specific tools and technologies are developed and applied to achieve effective waste sorting. The tour concluded with a visit to the Pellenc Innovation Center which had opened just one week before the meeting. The Center is equipped with four different sorting lines and is the size of a real Materials Recovery Facility. The center will enable Pellenc ST to develop and test waste sorting technologies at an industrial scale, bringing us closer to achieving a circular economy.

We thank our partners at Pellenc ST for their gracious hosting. For more information about the company, please visit pellencst.com.

 

Published 30/08/2022 | Last edited 25/10/2022

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