Tomra Recycling unveils applications to differentiate food-grade from non-food-grade plastics

Tomra’s GAIN technology – today rebranded GAINnext to pay tribute to the product’s significant evolution – resolves all of these challenges by further enhancing the sorting performance of the company’s Autosort units so they are capable of identifying objects that are hard and, in some cases, even impossible to classify using traditional optical waste sensors.

By combining its traditional near-infrared, visual spectrometry or other sensors with deep learning technology, Tomra has developed the most accurate solution available on the market today. And the degrees of purity that this solution is achieving – upwards of 95% for the packaging applications in customers’ plants across UK and Europe – will open up opportunities for new revenue streams for Tomra’s customers.

Tomra is also launching two non-food applications that complement the company’s existing GAINnext ecosystem: an application for deinking paper for cleaner paper streams, and a PET cleaner application for even higher purity PET bottle streams.

Dr. Volker Rehrmann, EVP, head of Tomra Recycling, notes the use of AI technology to improve sorting performance for decades, but adds that this latest application marks another industry first.

“AI has the power to transform resource recovery as we know it, and our latest sophisticated applications of deep learning and AI reinforce our position as a pioneer in this field,” Rehrmann adds.