In an announcement this afternoon (12 December), Tomra said that after installing four AutoSort machines with sensor-based technology in July, the company has now fully deployed previous pickers to other parts of the business.
The company, which provides waste management and recycling solutions to commercial and industrial countries across the South East, first installed Tomra’s AutoSort units at its C&I MRF in November 2021.
In July 2022, Green Recycling shut down the plant to enable the installation of four additional AutoSort units, with the full optimisation of all five units taking place at the start of August. The additional units are programmed to automatically recover plastic film, cardboard, wood, bottles and other rigid plastics, while the original AutoSort unit has switched to recover mixed office paper.
The pandemic made us realise that we needed to change the business model
- Jamie Smith, Green Recycling
Pandemic
Jamie Smith, operations director at Green Recycling, said the four additional units were the “final piece in the jigsaw” for its automated project, brought about by the pandemic.
“The pandemic made us realise that we needed to change the business model and move away from our reliance on manual picking. We have always had a keen interest in automation and artificial intelligence, so over the past 18 months we have invested heavily in automation to enhance our screening, sizing and separation operations, including ballistic separators, automated magnets and eddy current separators.
“Thanks to this investment, and the addition of the additional four latest generation Autosort units, we can safely say that we are now operating a picker-less MRF and all our former picking staff have been redeployed into other roles within the business.”
Services
Green Recycling provides a wide range of waste management and recycling solutions to commercial and industrial businesses throughout the South East of England. The family-run company has over 30 years’ experience and is based in Maldon, Essex.
At its C&I MRF, material is sized and then sorted using 2D/3D ballistic separation, with magnets used to remove metals.
The 2D items are then further sorted using Tomra’s Deep Laiser technology, which enables the identification and subsequent removal of all film-based material, including black waste bags. This material is then sent for further resorting and film recycling/recovery in the UK.
Robots
The company has been investing in automation software for a number of years.
In 2017, it claimed to be the first company in the UK to invest in a Max-AI autonomous robot (see letsrecycle.com story).
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