By Bill Bregar
SENIOR STAFF REPORTER
Published: July 30, 2014 11:00 am ET
Updated: July 30, 2014 11:04 am ET
Redwave, the Austrian manufacturer of optical sorting machines for recycled plastics, supplied a line for the regional government's IMOG sorting facility in South West Flanders, which processes more than 4,000 metric tons a year of mixed light packaging material and polypropylene.
The time frame for the installation was tight, since the process could only be interrupted for three weeks.
Blue plastic bags of material are fed into a bag opener and then move on to a trommel screen. Fines from the screen are collected and the overspill is gets separated by hand. The medium fraction is passed under a magnet to remove ferrous materials, then goes on to the two Redwave sorters.
Sorting is done by a three-way system, with near-infrared and color detection. The first optical sorter ejects PET in one channel and HDPE TetraPak materials in the second channel. The second Redwave carries out fine sorting of both of these channels into four clean streams: clkear PET, blue PET, TetraPak cartons and HDPE.
The remaining stream of materials is passed over an eddy current separator and a final hand-picking station.
Redwave scanners can be changed to different sorting options in a matter of seconds.
Redwave is a division of BT-Wolfgang Binder GmbH. Its U.S. subsidiary is in New York. | 
