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PlastiCircle improves the quality of recycled plastic

17 July 2020

Cities that have used the PlastiCircle approach to manage plastic waste have not only recycled more, but also better. In the Spanish city of Valencia, the first one to implement the pilot in 2019, the recycled plastic sorted by neighbours in the pilot phase was of superior quality than regular material.

In the first half of the project, PlastiCircle achieved its main objective of increasing efficiency and recovery in the sorting stage of the process. Picvisa, the partner responsible for the sorting process, worked on improving the segmentation algorithms to be able to better detect objects on the conveyor belts. As a result, improvements were made to the analysis of the NIR hyperspectral information to improve the classification of material, especially regarding the identification of multilayer materials.

Besides, the sorting process in Valencia resulted in more recycled plastic and less material thrown to landfills, as explained by Luís Segui, managing director of Picvisa. The project also demonstrated the recovery of the polythene (PE) film and the importance of also treating PET Trays as an important material to be detected and separated.

The consortium is confident that the improvements developed within PlastiCircle will be soon available for the market of recycled plastic. The next aims are to improve the purity of PE film to achieve the objective of keeping precision in sorting higher than 95 percent (it is currently 91 percent) and keeping the PE film and polypropylene (PP) film with rejects lower than 5 percent.

The PlastiCircle approach, aimed at improving plastic packaging from waste to valuable resources, is divided into four phases: collecting, transport, sorting, and reprocessing. The third and final pilot was launched on 1 July 2020 in the city of Alba Iulia, Romania, and will run until 30 September 2020. You can find more information about the pilots here