Plastic Sorting with Chemical Imaging Systems
Waste disposal has become a very important challenge in the last few years. Consequently also the recycling industry has developed to a large and high-yield sector. Because of rising personal costs and the rising demand for highest material purity, modern recycling plants work nearly fully automated.
EVK has noticed this trend in the year 2006 and started its development on Chemical Imaging systems for industrial applications. Since 2007 these systems were installed in many recycling plants worldwide. Our products are constantly under further development to face the permanent rising industrial and economical requirements. EVK Chemical Imaging Systems are modular designed and can easily adapt to customer requirements like throughput, material size, working width and transportation speed. EVK is always a reliable partner to accomplish sorting tasks which focus on chemical and physical material properties.
EVK has noticed this trend in the year 2006 and started its development on Chemical Imaging systems for industrial applications. Since 2007 these systems were installed in many recycling plants worldwide. Our products are constantly under further development to face the permanent rising industrial and economical requirements. EVK Chemical Imaging Systems are modular designed and can easily adapt to customer requirements like throughput, material size, working width and transportation speed. EVK is always a reliable partner to accomplish sorting tasks which focus on chemical and physical material properties.
The world wide consumption of plastic rises approximately 9% per year and was 2009 at around 230 million tons per year. The per year capita consumption in the countries of the NAFTA and Western Europe is around 100 kg and it is supposed that it will rise up to 140 kg till 2015.
Only the demand of the European processing industry for plastic was around 45 million tons in the year 2009. As well as waste paper or waste glass, waste plastic can be recovered. But for plastic recovery the sorting accuracy is very important. There are around 20 distinct groups of plastic, each with numerous grades available to help deliver specific properties for different applications. There are five high-volume plastic families demanded as shown on the graph beside. In most waste streams these groups of plastic are mainly mixed which makes a direct reuse nearly impossible. Consequently, plastic fractions have to be separated. As it can be imagined the higher the purity of the separated plastic streams the higher the prices which can be reached for recoverd plastic. Therefore the Chemical Imaging Systems HELIOS from EVK have been specially designed in the year 2006. Since 2007 these systems are well established and are under continuous further development to give EVK's customers the ability to provide worldwide competitive sorting machines with highest sorting accuracy. | 
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Build your plastic sorting machine supported by EVK.
"Improve your conveyor belt to a sorting machine"
For users that want to adapt an existing conveyor belt with a NIR (near infrared) sorting unit or for machine builders that have never constructed a sorting machine for recycling applications, EVK is offering its Chemical Imaging system "HELIOS Complete" as well as proper construction support beginning from mounting suspension till specifying the ejection unit.
Our experience has shown that after EVK's customers had fulfilled the provided machine specifications, the installation of the Chemical Imaging System HELIOS Complete, was done within one day. - After another day of staff training, the machine was sorting all wanted or rather unwanted plastics like PVC, PS, PET, PE, PP, ... Don't hesitate to contact us if you want to enter the high-yield plastic recycling market easily. |  Sorting sheme for plastic recycling |
"We are always pleased having close relations to our customers. Therefore we are always driven to provide ideal services and support for our customers." (EVK-Philosophy 2006 - 2011)
  | According to EVK's philosophy the support for building a plastic recycling machine could be offered as seen on the left hand side.
Left we have presented some examples of materials which can be easily handled with the presented technology.
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Plastic Sorting Systems for system integrators
"Develop your own plastic sorting applications"
System integrators or organizations that have machine vision competence are addressed by the Chemical Imaging System HELIOS EC3. These systems give developers the ability to easily develop Chemical Imaging applications.
Therefore HELIOS EC3 provides the chemical imaging data color coded, what opens the possibility to integrate HELIOS EC3 like a standard color line scan camera into an existing image processing solution. In the upper image beside you can see the configuration tool for HELIOS EC3 where 3 different plastics (PVC, PS and PE) are analyzed and a configuration set for the system is defined and generated. The lower image beside shows a life-stream of E-scrap flakes provided by the above configured HELIOS EC3 system. Here the strengths of the EC3 system become obvious. As you can see not only the before taught plastics are represented but also some other plastics, that are in the stream of flakes are presented (blue parts). That is pretty important for impurity detection, e.g. for PET flakes monitoring. Therefore, once the system is configured, it always presents PET-flakes in the same color - all other parts are definitely presented in other colors than the "PET-color" which gives the ability to differentiate easily between wanted material (e.g. PET) and unwanted material with standard image processing methods. |   |
