Case Study — Hostalets de Pierola Ecopark
The CESPA-managed plant operates two 8-hour shifts from Monday to Saturday.
During 2019, the ECOPARC IV light packaging plant, located in Hostalets de Pierola, Catalonia, processed nearly 18,000 tons. During this period, the treatment line worked at maximum capacity, achieving good performance, both in terms of recovery and purity of materials. It was found that if the line worked above this capacity its performance dropped substantially.
Due to the increase in expected inputs and in order to maintain working shifts, it was necessary to increase the tons per hour treated by the line, while maintaining the same product recovery and purity ratios.
On the one hand, PICVISA incorporated a new optical sorter, ECOPACK 2000, with the objective of decongesting the current ballistic separator, the main “bottleneck” of the facility. This new equipment was installed at the discharge of the belt that collected the 50–200mm fraction from the sorting trommel, positively separating all recoverable 3D material and sending it to the next optical separator, also an ECOPACK 2000.
To ensure that the material collected in the 50–200mm trommel plunge arrives spread across the width of the first optical acceleration belt, a material spreader, specifically a DS-01 disc spreader, was installed.
The second new optical sorter decongests the existing cascade of optical sorters of the 3D fraction of the ballistic separator. It positively blows the majority fraction, in this case PET (between 10% and 20% by weight of the input), and sends it via conveyor belts to manual quality control in the existing cabin.
Both sorters can work beyond the plant’s capacity, leaving room for future expansions, and more than meet the customer’s performance requirements, with recovery and purity levels of 90–95%. Thanks to the flexibility of multispectral vision, ECOPACK optical sorters can be configured for quick changes in the classification of new materials by composition (NIR), color (VIS) and/or shape (deep learning).
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