Project description
A novel scanner will ensure less black and coloured plastic ends up in landfills
Take a look around your home, the inside of your car, your office building or your school and you will notice that most of the plastic associated with electronics is black. While the polymeric materials are often amenable to recycling, some coatings and additives are not. Unfortunately, there is currently no reliable method to determine the presence of restricted additives in black plastics. The recycling industry is forced to return a large volume of recyclable waste to the waste stream, an inefficient process that impacts the environment. The EU-funded SELEX project has developed a solution: patented X-ray technology that can identify polymers and additives in black and coloured plastics. Commercialisation is moving forward with EU support.
Objective
Existing plastic sorting technologies are not able to sort black plastics based on the type of polymer and to identify the presence of additives such as Brominated Flame Retardants (BFR) and pollutants which are forbidden by EU directives on recycling. For this reason, black plastics, which represent 30-50% of plastic scraps in Waste Electric and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) and End-of-Life Vehicles (ELV), end up as residue and are disposed in landfills, buried or exported outside EU, producing additional costs instead of value for the recycling industry. Indeed, the recycling rate of plastics from WEEE in Europe is only 20% of the amount returned with the waste stream.
SELEX patented solution exploits for the first time a combination of X-ray solutions allowing: 1) to discriminate polymers used in the plastic matrix both for coloured and black plastics; 2) to provide quantitative information about presence of fillers, additives and pollutants present in the polymer matrix, including BFR. SELEX is applied in 2 solutions: 1) Portable device, to check material compliance with regulation and specifications, 2) In-line device to be integrated in sorting plants for black / polluted plastics, based on type of polymers or additive and in-line product quality control for compounders.
The portable prototype was developed and tested in relevant conditions with the most common families of plastics and additives, using hundreds of certified real WEEE samples and confirming reliable, easy and fast analysis (<1 sec). The target of the feasibility study is to define the go-to-market of SELEX portable device (cost optimization, pricing and agreement with industrial partner for licensing) and planning the steps for the implementation of the in-line system (speed vs resolution, integration, production costs). The main segments for SELEX are 1) WEEE and ELV recyclers and 2) plastic compounders. The TAM in both segments is valued >2.8 billion Euro with first market in EU of >560 MEuro.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1Coordinator
00067 ROMA
Italy
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.