Sorting Plants for Film

The subject of film sorting has only recently become a focus of the recycling industry. STADLER identified the demand – and responded immediately. We were the first plant constructor to develop a corresponding sorting concept, which is specially tailored to the properties of film produced from different polyolefins.

STADLER experience

“Due to high demand, several STADLER film sorting plants are currently in continuous operation in Germany, the Netherlands and Bulgaria.”

Material properties

In STADLER film sorting plants, the various polyolefins are differentiated from each other and separated accordingly.

Example process description

Working in close cooperation with Krones AG, we optimise the entire recycling process in the film sector, both in terms of both sorting quality and throughput. First of all, the film delivered are fed to a dewiring system. This removes the wires from the bales fully automatically and collects them separately. After the bales have been broken up, the material flow is screened and then fed to downstream ballistic separators. The input is then precisely separated by several NIR-sorters according to the different film materials and fed to further processing. The material is initially shredded and then pre-washed to remove the first impurities. At this point, the mass flow can already be separated into colours (e.g. coloured and transparent). Next comes the hot washing process, for decontaminating the flakes. These can pass through a further NIR device for more precise sorting into the desired fraction, in order to achieve a higher degree of purity. The process ends with extrusion and the material is now ready for manufacturing a new product.