Tomra unveils collaborative recycling of injection-moulded black plastics

Tomra has developed partnerships across the industry’s value chain to responsibly decommission its reverse vending machines when no longer needed.

The recycling tech company says the arrangement has the potential for scale so that quality-assured, premium black plastic can be processed across a range of industries. 

It has established Retility, a value-chain collaboration set up to recycle materials from retired Tomra reverse vending machines. The initiative also offers quality recycled content for use in the production of new equipment or parts. 

Goals

The company has sustainability goals to ensure that, by 2030, at least 90% of the materials and components in new products are sustainable, and at least 50% of products are circular at their end of life. It says its ‘open-access ecosystem’ can help other manufacturers.  

Reverse vending machines are typically made with black polymers which are hard to identify and separate in the recycling process. Applications of black polymers are also found in computer and mobile technology, where up to 60% of the associated plastics are black, and the automotive industry, where around 90% of plastics are coloured black. 

Partners

Working with European Recycling Platform in Norway, Tomra’s reverse vending machines are decommissioned at their end of life. During disassembly, a range of black plastic parts are pre-sorted by polymer type before being passed to Polykemi, an industrial plastics compounder, to be recycled into a quality-assured material stream.

Fully documented, high-quality recycled content is then sent to Tomra’s existing injection moulding partners to become new polymer parts. 

Marius Fraurud, head of Tomra collection, says: ‘We encourage all relevant producers to join this ecosystem and join us in driving the resource revolution forward. We would be glad to offer our insight on this initiative and facilitate any necessary connections between stakeholders.’

The company’s head of sustainability, Christina Ek, adds: ‘We hope that this initiative will result in a vast amount of valuable black plastic being diverted from incineration towards recycling, while unlocking greater access to recycled content for our peers across the technology and manufacturing industries.

‘We have a saying that there is no such thing as waste. Retility is about putting that into practice.’