The German manufacturer of separation and sorting systems Sesotec (Schönberg; www.sesotec.com) has built a machine that can successfully identify and separate food and non-food PET bottles. The sorting technology has been developed as part of the EU-funded three-year Polymark project (www.polymark.org) that has focused on creating new fluorescence-based technology to increase the level of food-contact-approved recyclate from the PET recycling process – see Plasteurope.com of 30.09.2015.

To differentiate between food-PET and non-food PET, a bottle type is coated with an invisible marker (that fluoresces under UV illumination) either applied to the outside of the bottle or printed on the label or envelope, which the sorting machine detects. In traditional PET recycling processes, the bottles are usually separated by colour and plastic type.

Patrick Peuch of Petcore Europe (Brussels / Belgium; https://petcore-europe.org), one of the partners in the project, commented: "Our research partners have successfully developed a complete technology package. The sorting technology was developed in parallel to the marking technology and test runs have demonstrated that the markers can be detected by the sorting machine and that the respective bottles can be separated. Economically efficient and profitable high-speed sorting with the result of pure food-PET for bottle-to-bottle recycling thus has become possible."

Sesotec hosted the final meeting of the Polymark consortium in Schönberg / Germany on 7-8 February 2017.