Page 54 - Hub-4 Magazine Issue 66

Recycling
STADLER: innovating on the path to a circular
Ferrocarril plant
economy
Crisóforo Arroyo, Gerente General La Perseverancia
The recycling sector is growing and evolving fast, as the world moves towards a circular economy model to address the environmental challenges of this century. STADLER is supporting the sector, anticipating the changes, and providing solutions as new requirements arise.
The pursuit of a circular economy to address the global issues of waste and resource scarcity is driving the evolution of the recycling industry, which is translating into new requirements from waste sorting plants. STADLER is quick to identify new demands and provide a solution, either by developing a new machine or optimizing existing ones. It conducts extensive testing on the proposed solution at its Test Centers or at the customer’s plant until the desired result is achieved.
Anticipating new requirements with innovative solutions
A significant change in recycling industry is the increasingly high purity level of the sorted fractions it requires of waste sorting plants. They need this to meet their customers’
demand for high-quality recycled end-products that can compete with virgin materials on the market. Another important change is the growing demand for specialization in the sorting processes and for the ability to sort multiple materials flexibly.
STADLER has anticipated these changes and has already completed various projects that meet the new demands. The company designed and built one of the world’s first sorting plants specializing in film, the Integra Plastics plant in Sofia, Bulgaria, with a capacity of 4 tonnes/hour, sorts the fractions into HDPE, PP and LDPE and by color (transparent, blue, and green).
STADLER is also breaking new ground in achieving a textile circular economy, where current manual sorting processes are unable to meet the high-purity requirements of the recycling companies and the fashion industry. It has designed, in collaboration with TOMRA, the world’s first fully automated textile sorting plant with a capacity of 4.5 tonnes/hour in Malmö for Sysav Industri AB. The plant is part the Swedish Innovation Platform for Textile Sorting (SIPTex) government- funded project, which aims to develop a sorting solution tailored to the purity demands of textile recyclers and the garment industry.
Tailored solutions to match the customer’s specific requirements with a complete solution
STADLER takes a holistic approach to every project, analyzing the individual customer’s operational and business requirements, and developing a tailored solution that perfectly matches their needs. This is what Lars Krejberg Petersen, Dansk Retursystem CEO, found when STADLER designed and built their beverage sorting plant in Taastrup, Denmark: it is “a dedicated professional integrator capable of providing an end-to-end solution for material streams.” He was also very
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www.hub-4.com Jan/Feb 2021 - Issue 66