Walking into a plastic recycling plant in the suburbs of Bangkok, the plant manager Anan pointed to the newly installed high-speed optical sorter for plastic materials and said frankly: "This machine turned our monthly loss into profit." Today, when the global recycling gross profit is less than 8%, this technology is becoming the key to the survival of the industry.

 

Pain point analysis: The hidden cost of manual sorting

"Green Source Recycling" in Haiphong City, Vietnam, once conducted an experiment:

 

20 workers sorted mixed plastic bottles for 8 hours, with an error rate of 13%

Mistakenly judged black PET bottles were mixed into the HDPE pile, and the entire batch of materials depreciated by 40%

Night shift efficiency plummeted by 35%, but the work injury rate increased by 22%

Until they introduced efficient plastic pellet sorting equipment, the sorting accuracy jumped from 87% to 99.2%. In just three months, the material loss cost was reduced by US$110,000.

 

Technical analysis: Black technology that does not rely on color to identify materials

The core of the new generation of advanced technology for plastic waste sorting is:

 

Molecular-level detection: Near-infrared spectroscopy identifies polymer molecular structures, and can even identify agricultural films that have been degraded for three years

Dual-precision spray valve: 256 air bullets are fired in 0.03 seconds to accurately remove 0.5mm PS impurities

Self-learning algorithm: After a machine in a Mexican factory ran for half a year, the recognition rate of faded LDPE increased to 98.7%

Cost comparison: How automation rewrites the profit formula

Take a medium-sized factory with a processing capacity of 50 tons/day as an example:

Cost items	Manual sorting	Optical sorting
Material loss rate	9%	0.5%
Customer claim rate	6%	0.1%

 

Data source: 2024 Global Recycling Equipment White Paper

 

The actual case of Indonesia's "Ocean Regeneration" company is even more amazing: 9 months after installing the sorting machine, they actually grabbed a long-term order from Japan's Toyobo at a price as low as $15 per ton - just because the purity reached the standard of 99.3%.