Abstract
Recycling plastic is an important step towards a circular economy. Attaining high-quality recycled plastics requires the separation of plastic waste by type, color, and size prior to reprocessing. Automated technology is key for sorting plastic objects in medium- to high-volume plants. The current state of the art of commercial equipment for sorting plastic as well as challenges faced by Material Recovery Facilities (MRFs) to sort post-consumer plastics are analyzed here. Equipment for sorting plastic recyclables were identified using publicly available information obtained from manufacturers’ websites, press releases, and journal articles. Currently available automated sorting equipment and artificial intelligence (AI)-based sorters are evaluated regarding their functionality, efficiency, types of plastics they can sort, throughput, and accuracy. The information compiled captures the progress made during the ten years since similar reports were published. A survey of MRFs, reclaimers, and brokers in the United States identified methods of sorting used for plastic, sorting efficiency, and current practices and challenges encountered at MRFs in sorting plastic recyclables. The commercial sorting equipment can address some of the challenges that MRFs face. However, sorting of film, multilayered, blended, or mixed-material plastics is problematic, as the equipment is typically designed to sort single-component materials. Accordingly, improvements and/or new solutions are considered necessary.
Highlights
Post-consumer plastics are difficult to manage with the current recycling infrastructure, mainly due to the large volume of waste generated, combined with the complexity of effectively sorting different types, shapes, and sizes of plastics for recycling
In order to assess whether current sorting equipment can address the challenges reported by Material Recovery Facilities (MRFs) operators, we evaluated both current systems and emerging sorting equipment (i.e., artificial intelligence (AI) sorting robots) using metrics on their efficiency, types of plastic sorted, size of plastic sorted, and ability to sort by color [13,37]
As most MRFs receive large volumes of mixed plastics, automated sorting has proven efficient in separating large plastics while maintaining a high throughput of sorted materials
Summary
Post-consumer plastics are difficult to manage with the current recycling infrastructure, mainly due to the large volume of waste generated, combined with the complexity of effectively sorting different types, shapes, and sizes of plastics for recycling. Higher recycling rates of post-consumer plastics can be achieved by improving sorting efficiency. Plastics need to be separated by type and color before reprocessing. Separation by type is performed at the Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) level, while industrial singletype plastics are typically handled by brokers. A few MRFs sort plastics from both municipal and industrial waste. Reclaimers obtain plastics sorted by MRFs and brokers for reprocessing into new plastic materials [5,6]
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