re3, the waste management partnership between FCC Environment and Bracknell Forest, Reading and Wokingham borough councils, partnered with London-based technology company Recycleye to install the retrofittable system in September 2021 (see letsrecycle.com story).
FCC uses the robot, described as the first of its kind in England, to target, segregate and remove contamination from a split-stream line containing food-grade HDPE and other plastics.
The robot carries out up to 55 successful picks a minute, according to Recycleye, increasing the volume of plastics FCC can sort by 12%.
re3 compared the level of contamination on the line picked by the robot to one picked by humans. The line picked by the robot achieved 99% purity, whereas the line picked by humans achieved 96%.
This “increases the value” of the recyclates sold by FCC, Recycleye says, as high purity food-grade plastics sell for “up to five times the price” of non-food grade.
Rory Brien, FCC’s general manager for re3, said: “At FCC Environment, we believe that it is important to be forward-thinking and adapt to new technologies.
“This work has produced higher volumes of more valuable food-grade plastic for recycling, which is good for our business and the planet and has again reinforced the need to constantly innovate. We are now looking to install further Recycleye Robotics.”
Recycleye Vision
Recycleye says the robot is powered by Recycleye Vision, an AI system which detects all the individual items in a waste stream by material and object.
The AI system sits on top of the MRF’s existing conveyor belts, providing the management team at the Reading site with “total visibility” of waste streams through so-called ‘data dashboards’.
Victor Dewulf, Recycleye’s CEO, said: “We are delighted to have achieved the results we set out to for re3 and FCC.
“Delivering these types of reliable results in the sorting of waste plastics demonstrates how robust and effective our robotics and computer vision are at increasing the value of outputs for MRFs and so reducing the ROI of recycling.”
Recycleye told letsrecycle.com they could not disclose the price of the technology as “every installation is different”.
re3
re3 is responsible for arranging the disposal of household waste collected across Bracknell Forest, Reading and Wokingham.
Established in 1999, the partnership has worked with FCC since 2006, though the waste management company was then known as WRG (see letsrecycle.com story).
FCC employs more than 55,000 people worldwide and nearly 2,400 people across the UK. The company says it recycles 1.6 million tonnes of waste and generate more than 117MW of “green energy” every year.
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