Wyllie Recycling Ltd, a number one family-owned recycling companies in Scotland, has invested in three of TOMRA’s AUTOSORT™ optical sorters as a part of a £3 million improve on the firm’s blended containers MRF in Perth.
Designed particularly for native authority contracts, 20,000 tonnes of blended containers are processed yearly on the MRF, particularly aluminium and metal cans, plastic bottles and pots, tubs and trays.
The Perth web site additionally recycles different plastics, wooden, cardboard and newsprint, and it incorporates Scotland’s largest safe drinks destruction facility.
Wyllie Recycling has contracts with seven native authorities in Scotland with a mixed inhabitants of over 1 million individuals, representing roughly 20% of the Scottish market.
Every native authority’s materials is collected by the Wyllie Recycling’s personal fleet of walking-floor trailers earlier than being delivered to the MRF for processing utilizing three AUTOSORTTM items from TOMRA. These had been put in in January 2024 and are programmed to focus on six grades of polymers, together with HDPE (pure and jazz), PET (clear and jazz), and PP pots, tubs and trays. The sorting line operates at a fee of 5 tonnes per hour (TPH).
Previous to investing within the AUTOSORTTM items, Wyllie Recycling used magnets and eddy currents to type aluminium and metal cans, however the recovered polymers had been simply offered as blended plastic bottles (MPB).
John Gilmour, Industrial Supervisor at Wyllie Recycling, feedback: “When we began planning our MRF upgrade, we wanted a proven technology which would be reliable, affordable and, critically, could produce the material quality requirements of our buyers. TOMRA’s AUTOSORTTM units deliver on all of these counts. We are achieving excellent tonnage throughput and high purity levels, without incurring any additional labour costs. We’ve gone from selling our recovered polymers as mixed plastic bottles to producing six grades of exceptionally high purity food-grade products, enabling us to fulfil our buyers’ demand for this material.”
Steven Walsh, Space Gross sales Supervisor UK at TOMRA Recycling Sorting, provides: “Wyllie Recycling offers a unique service solution for mixed containers from local authorities and it’s great to see the results that our technology is achieving in this particular application. Our partnership with Wyllie Recycling was built over a long development phase and I’m delighted not only to see the project come to fruition, but to see them make such a positive impact on the Scottish domestic recycling market.”
The AUTOSORTTM is a multifunctional sorting system which makes use of superior sensors, together with NIR (close to infrared) and optionally MIR (mid infrared) spectroscopy, to exactly determine completely different polymer varieties. TOMRA says this enables for far more correct sorting than conventional strategies which depend on color or form recognition alone. It’s able to processing giant volumes of fabric rapidly and its compact and ultra-flexible design imply it could combine seamlessly into each new and present crops.
