Established by Tomra as part of their material circularity initiative, Retility, the value-chain collaboration was set up to effectively recycle materials from retired Tomra reverse vending machines, while also providing access to quality recycled content for use in the production of new Tomra technologies.
Different plastic polymers are suited to different applications. While flexible compounds could be effective for making plastic bags, compounds with stronger structural qualities could be a better match for moulded items. But a blend of these compounds might not perform well in either application. This means that the composition of any polymer compound must be reliably documented to ensure it meets the needs of its specific application.
To enable this, sorting technologies are used to separate different polymer types from one another and keep material streams pure, meaning recyclers can be confident of the composition of material going in, and therefore coming out, of their recycling processes. For clear and coloured compounds, this is a common practice, but for black compounds, it’s often a different story.
A common method for making plastic black is to mix it with carbon. Unfortunately, carbon black polymers are notoriously difficult to recycle as they are not recognized by many available sorting technologies, whereby different polymer compounds could be separated from one another. This issue is a barrier to keeping each polymer type’s purity high enough to guarantee the desired physical properties are maintained in the new recycled compounds. As a result, carbon black polymers are typically sent for incineration.
Applications of black polymers are found overwhelmingly in computer and mobile technology, where up to 60% of the associated plastics are black, and the automotive industry, where around 90% of plastics are coloured black.
Working with European Recycling Platform in Norway, Tomra reverse vending machines are responsibly decommissioned at their end of life. During disassembly, a range of black plastic parts are pre-sorted by polymer type before being passed to Polykemi, an industrial plastics compounder, to be recycled in a quality-assured material stream. Thereafter, the fully documented, high-quality recycled content is sent to Tomra’s existing injection moulding partners to become new polymer parts.
