Plastic sorting with Perception STUDIO

Approximately 8 million metric tonnes of plastic waste enter the Earth’s ocean every year. Since most of the plastic is non-biodegradable, recycling must be a part of global efforts to reduce plastic pollution. Even at the end-of-life phase, plastics remain a too valuable resource to be simply thrown away. If Europe were exploiting the full potential of plastics waste still landfilled applying today’s best recycling, energy recovery practices and technologies in an eco-efficient manner, this could lead to: • 5 million tons of plastics additionally recycled, preventing the emission of 7 million tons per year of CO2 (equivalent to taking 2,4 million cars off the road) • An additional generation of 300 TWh of heat and electricity, equivalent to 23% of Europe gas imports from Russia 1.3. What can recycle be used for? Well, recycled plastics can be reused for many things. There are many products in our daily use that already have or at least could have recycled materials inside. Anyhow, nowadays we do not tap the full potential in plastics recycling even though we now have the technical possibilities e.g. by using the Perception STUDIO. Thanks to their unique properties, plastic materials are essential in many applications and often make the impossible possible. However, to take full advantage of the benefits of plastics, its products need to be properly recovered and managed when they reach the end of their lifetime circle. It is simple, plastics are just too valuable to be wasted or thrown away. Such improvements will require appropriate actions to stop landfilling of plastics and the establishment of recovery-oriented collection schemes. These will need to be aligned with modern sorting infrastructure and improved recycling and recovery processes to exploit the fullest potential of this precious resource. Furthermore, with a focus on high quality and market standards, this will stimulate markets for the more resource-efficient use of end-of-life plastics throughout Europe. The example below shows the great potential of the Chemical Colour Imaging technology to properly recover various plastics in a single step. Here we present how Chemical Colour Imaging is applied by the Perception STUDIO and its “ONE-CLICK-CLASSIFICATION” for plastic flake sorting. The Perception STUDIO provides an easy-to-use 6 step workflow to independently develop a plastic sorting application while saving up to 95% of the development time.