Our integrated Energy-from-Waste plant in Wijster has balanced separation and sorting equipment, such as vibrating screens, ballistic and infra-red separators. Attero Wijster is also the largest post-separating plant in the world. Our site in Groningen uses the same balanced equipment. Both plants form the basis for products, such as biogas, metals and plastics, that make a sustainable society a reality. In the Polymer Sorting Plant (PSP) in Wijster these post-separated streams, together with source-separated PMD packaging materials, are sorted into mono-streams, such as PET, PE, PP.

Separating and sorting in Wijster

In the world's largest post-separating plant, a large vibrating screen separates organic and fine material and divides the rest of the residual waste by size into three streams. Organic waste is fed to a digester that produces biogas. The remaining streams go sorted by size on conveyors to ballistic separators. They separate the remaining materials into light flat materials (newspapers and films) and 3-dimensional heavier materials. So-called film separators then remove the soft plastic packaging and plastic films from the residual waste. Infra-red technology recognises hard plastic packaging, such as soft-drinks bottles, shampoo bottles and other plastics with a fixed shape. Together with drinks cartons they are blown from the waste stream on the conveyor. Conveyors transport those streams of hard and soft plastics and drinks cartons to the sorting factory.

Source-separated packaging waste is a mixture of plastics, drinks cartons and metals, often collected in plastic bags. They are torn open by machine and their content is taken on a conveyor to the sorting plant. This plant consists of a large number of consecutive infra-red separators, alternated with ballistic and film separators. One shoots out PET bottles, another separator the drinks cartons, a third separator the shampoo and detergent bottles etc. The result is nine part-streams that can be recycled.