Burkasan Uses TOMRA's Sorting Technology

Burkasan's new plastic recycling facility, established with a TRY 50 million investment utilizing Zone 5 incentives, produces raw materials for HDPE bottle manufacturing. Starting operations with the most advanced technologies, the recycled plastic feedstock produced at the facility with the support of TOMRA's sensor-based sorting machines delivering high-purity separation will be used for the first time in Turkey in HDPE plastic bottle production. Speaking at their facilities in Bursa Kestel, Burkasan Chairman of the Board Vedat Kılıç stated, "Using TOMRA's optical sorting machines, we aim to produce the highest quality feedstock from waste plastics. In our new facility where we are trying to capture the Industry 4.0 revolution, technological equipment was of great importance to achieve the product quality and capacity we targeted. To this end, particularly aiming for 99 percent purity rates and presenting our products to important global companies, we chose TOMRA, a global leader in its field as a solution partner, and the most advanced sorting solutions" he said. Emphasizing that Burkasan Waste Management and Environmental Consulting, as a licensed recycling company, ranks among Bursa's first and Turkey's pioneers in this field, Kılıç stated; "From 2005 onwards, until the packaging waste regulation issued by the Ministry of Environment and even to a certain extent still today, our sector has continued its activities with the scrap concept. For this reason, by breaking down the scrap dealer concept in the sector, we are trying to contribute to the development of our sector in Turkey as a professional waste management company managing all processes. Establishing Turkey's first refrigerator crushing facility was a good example of this. Now we are setting another precedent with plastic recycling. For the first time at our facility, plastic bottles equivalent to virgin material will be produced from waste plastic" he said. [caption id="attachment_103545" align="aligncenter"] Burkasan Vedat Kılıç[/caption]

"Turkey's recycling sector continues to grow"

Providing information on Turkey's recycling sector, Vedat Kılıç stated; "In Turkish industry, approximately 75-80 million tonnes of waste is generated annually. Looking at municipal waste, per capita daily waste in Turkey is around 1.1 kg. Accordingly, annual municipal waste generation is 33-35 million tonnes. These volumes in municipal waste encompass 7-8 million tonnes of recyclable waste such as metal, glass, plastic and aluminium, with HDPE accounting for 1-1.5 percent of total weight. However, unfortunately only a maximum of 1-1.5 million tonnes of these are collected, recycled and returned to the economy. 6-6.5 million tonnes still end up mixed with garbage without being recycled. In economic terms, this corresponds to an average annual value of around TRY 8-10 billion and represents a significant loss for our sector. Despite this situation and while Turkey's recycling sector is developing, we are importing waste as feedstock. On the other hand, despite feedstock shortages, Turkey's recycling sector continues to grow. It is important to sustain development through automation, achieve optimal recovery rates from limited raw materials and use sorting technologies to obtain high-purity end product quality. For this reason, we have made our investments with TOMRA's leading optical sorting technologies in the field to reach our targets. The high recovery rates we achieve thanks to TOMRA machines' low erroneous rejection advantage result in higher profitability" he explained.

"There is a need for facility investments to separate and recycle packaging at high capacities"

Stating that Burkasan has invested TRY 120 million in the waste management sector over the past five years, Chairman Vedat Kılıç also drew attention to the mandatory deposit scheme starting in 2021; "With this application, waste collection rates in our country will increase rapidly, so there is a need for facility investments to separate and recycle the beverage packaging that will be collected at high capacities. Therefore, we designed our new facility also considering the requirements of the deposit system. One reason for preferring TOMRA machines is this. We aimed to be prepared for future periods with state-of-the-art technology investment." Vedat Kılıç noted that with Burkasan's new facility investment, it manages approximately 15,000 tonnes of waste monthly; "At our new plastic recycling facility, we aim to process 2,500 tonnes of waste material monthly and obtain approximately 1,500 tonnes of product minimum. It is very difficult to achieve these targets with manual sorting. Even if you employ many workers, without benefiting from automation, it is hardly possible to achieve this capacity and high-purity product quality with manpower. Particularly considering the pandemic period and social distancing rules, manual sorting becomes a very difficult and costly method while not guaranteeing product quality. With TOMRA sorting machines, we overcome all these difficulties.

While providing products to our strong customers on a global platform, we are very strict about quality and quality control. With TOMRA we can achieve 99 percent purity" he said.

TOMRA AUTOSORT®, at the Burkasan facility, is positioned after pre-sorting operations at the beginning of the line. Following machines such as bale opening, magnets, eddy current and ballistic separators, actual sorting is performed by TOMRA AUTOSORT® machines. Subsequently, TOMRA AUTOSORT® FLAKE is used for final sorting of materials processed in the grinding-washing line and at the final stage of mixed plastics processed in the grinding-washing line. It is positioned in the advancing sections of the line to perform contamination removal. While sorting even the smallest foreign matter particles, it provides sorting by colour, metal and polymer type. It simultaneously combines colour detection, advanced material knowledge and metal object detection successfully. It optimizes contamination removal applications with maximum operating time regardless of particle size. TOMRA Sorting Recycling Turkey and Middle East Sales Manager Serkan Orhan, on the subject; "TOMRA AUTOSORT®, with its proven FLYING BEAM® technology, guarantees perfect homogeneous light distribution for better detection and sorting across the entire conveyor belt while delivering higher performance and operational efficiency. It enables the detection of materials that cannot be identified in manual sorting and further increases the purity levels of sorting" he said.