Total: PLA polluting PET recycling? Baseless!
Recently, France's TotalEnergies Corbion and Tomra Recycling conducted tests to evaluate the ability of a near-infrared NIR sorter to detect and separate polylactic acid packaging, and found that PLA can be separated from other plastics.
How complicated is it to separate bioplastics and other plastic parts from separate municipal waste collections?
To answer that question, at least as far as polylactic acid (PLA) products are concerned, TotalEnergies Corbion and Tomra Recycling, the Luminy-branded PLA manufacturer and supplier of waste sorting equipment respectively, conducted a workshop at the Tomra Center in Mülheim-Kärlich, Germany, in August. This study conducted a series of tests using a near-infrared NIR (Near Infrared) sensor.
According to TotalEnergies Corbion, a large number of PLA pallets were detected mixed with other post-consumer plastic items with very high separation rates. Also, and most importantly, no PLA packaging ended up in the PET stream (the most valuable) in the various selection tests.
For the French PLA manufacturer, this is further confirmation that PLA is separable at an industrial recycling level and does not contaminate other post-consumer plastic waste streams.
François de Bie, Senior Marketing and Supply Chain Director at TotalEnergies Corbion, said: “The claim that PLA contaminates PET recycling logistics is again unfounded. This is also confirmed by many other studies cited in our White Paper on PLA end-of-life options. "In other words, there are no technical barriers preventing the efficient separation of PLA from other plastic waste," he adds. Related reading, Total Cobion: PLA can be recycled! Composting is just one of the ways.
In addition, Jürgen Priests, head of Tomra Feed, said, "In a closed-circuit system using only PLA bottles and glass, the PLA is present in sufficient quantities to make the collection, selection and recovery of this biopolymer economically viable."
TotalEnergies Corbion has started recycling post-consumer PLA products from closed loop systems and the pre-consumer waste segment, reusing them to produce rPLA, which is mixed with untreated PLA, thus avoiding landfill or waste disposal, especially when there is no collection and composting In the case of organic waste infrastructure. Luminy rPLA grades are already on the market, containing 20% PLA, recycled from waste and post-consumer.
