Recycling Flexible Packaging: Henrik Beel, RTT System
16 October 2023
Hendrik Beel, Managing Director, RTT System
Hendrik is the Managing Director of RTT System GmbH. Here he is pushing the development of new tools for the quality control of material streams.
He provides insight into what common misconceptions people have about flexible packaging recyclability and how these can be addressed:
"The low area-weight and the dynamic behaviour of a speed-conveyor make the automatic sorting of flexible materials difficult. On the other hand, exactly these properties are very helpful to easily separate this material stream from the rigid material.
So the problem lies in the separation into the main groups of flexible materials (PE and PP).
For some years now, automatic sorting systems have been on the market that are capable of separating this material stream and producing single PE and PP fractions.
This technology is complex and requires a lot of space. Retrofitting in existing plants is usually not possible. For this reason, only a very small proportion of flexibles are separated into single and high-quality fractions in the sorting process today. The largest share of flexibles in absolute terms is marketed as a low-grade mixed fraction."