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| New test facility (right) |
TOMRA Recycling Sorting opened a second test facility at its headquarters in Germany to meet growing demand for material trials. The company now operates one test center each for waste and metal sorting applications at the same location.
The decision to extend capacities entailed another important change. Ralph Uepping, VP, Head of Technology at TOMRA Recycling Sorting explains: “Until recently, we’ve combined both metal and waste sorting machines in one area. Now, each test hall will be dedicated to one segment only. While waste sorting trials are done in the first established facility, the focus of the new facility is on metal sorting.”
While the new facility allows the company to place a stronger emphasis on the metals segment, waste applications continue to play an equally important role. The original test center started as a mobile test station in Andernach, Germany, moved to Mülheim-Kärlich in 2009, and steadily grew in sophistication. Today, it offers 1.500 m2 for waste sorting trials. The test possibilities range from the recovery of recyclable polymers from mixed and source-separated waste streams, to flake sorting, the separation of wood by material type, and many more.
Also, deep learning technologies, as a subset of AI, are part of TOMRA’s product portfolio and can be tested in different sorting tasks. Available as a complementary solution to its core technologies, deep learning is a future-forward tool that helps improve sorting performance by detecting previously hard or impossible-to-detect materials. Summarizing the advantages of the new test center setup, Ralph Uepping stresses: “All our products are installed and can be tested in a complete circuit. Together with our expert teams, we can simulate the entire sorting process with eddy currents, magnets, screens and a ballistic separator. This allows us to demonstrate the importance of material pre-treatment and define processes that are stable and economically viable even with changing input streams.
