Characterise-to-Sort: New technology to map out waste streams
VITO developed a technology that gives you quick insight into the composition of your entire waste stream. This makes it easier to extract value from your waste.
As a recycling company, it’s often difficult to know which materials are part of your complex material stream. You can only start sorting and recycling efficiently when you have this information. That’s why VITO developed Characterise-to-Sort. This technology quickly and easily gives you insight into the composition of your entire waste stream, without a time-consuming or expensive chemical analysis. It’s a way to develop new recycling processes or optimise existing processes.
Waste streams: full of sustainable resources
To reduce our dependence on fossil resources, the demand for sustainable, affordable resources is growing. It also drives the need for research on the repurposing of materials and ways to create value from waste.
Even today, this is a difficult and often time-consuming process. Waste isn’t always recycled in the most effective way and the quality of materials is often hard to measure.
The most important obstacles are the expensive and labour-intensive sampling procedures and the chemical analysis that follows, which lead to long waiting times and often financial insecurity.
Characterise-to-Sort gives insight into your entire complex material stream
To map out waste streams more easily, VITO developed Characterise-to-Sort (CtS). This device screens particles on a conveyor belt with a colour camera, a 3D laser scanner and X-rays.
With machine learning and artificial intelligence, CtS can recognise individual particles and assign parameters to them, such as shape, texture, mass, and material class. Based on those parameters, the device creates a digital “twin” of each particle. Those digital twins can give you insight into your entire waste stream:
- How many different materials does your complex material stream contain?
- What is the nature of those materials?
- How big are the particles and what shape are they?
- What is the mass of each particle?
- What is the value of your waste?
With Characterise-to-Sort, you can map out the materials in your complex material stream. Additionally, you can determine the waste’s value and simulate new recycling processes.
The end goal is to market this innovative technology as a service. To do that, we are scaling Characterise-to-Sort to an industrial level. To demonstrate its industrial relevance, we started the CHARAMBA project in collaboration with the University of Ghent, Suez and Umicore.
What are the advantages of Characterise-to-Sort?
- The technology delivers results quickly
- It’s a non-destructive analysis of your entire complex material stream
- You gain new insights and knowledge about materials so you can recycle more efficiently and get more value from your waste streams
Getting as much value out of your waste streams as possible?
We’re happy to help. Contact Kris Broos to find out more about Characterise-to-Sort.
