Plastic in waste streams used for energy recovery is an unnecessary source of fossil carbon dioxide emissions. Three Swedish cities are now testing a new digital camera technology with the goal of making it profitable to improve waste sorting and increase recycling.
Waste incineration in state-of-art energy recovery plants is an important service to society. The recovered energy is then a fantastic source of energy for district heating. But if plastic waste is not first sorted out, that part is an unnecessary source of fossil CO2 emissions.
Until today, it has only been possible to analyse specific loads of waste by hand-picking and weighing the components. This is time consuming and costly and thus only used a few times per year. Instead, the average amount of fossil CO2 in flue gas from incineration is measured. This means it is next to impossible to investigate which waste streams the plastic originated from.
Now three energy companies, Vattenfall, Tekniska Verken in Linköping and Umeå Energi have taken the initiative for a smart and portable facility that can identify and measure the content of various plastics in waste before it is incinerated. The tool, called FossilEye, makes it possible to trace the source and thus find out which waste customers correctly are good at sorting out plastic. The technology has been developed in collaboration with the company RoboWaste.