TECHNOLOGY | SORTING
IMAGE: PELLENC ST
Westmorland and Furness, and parts of Scotland. Two more UK recycling facilities will be upgraded with Tetra Pak’s support, bringing its 2025 UK sorting infrastructure investment to $1.9m. In May, J&B Recycling in Hartlepool became the first site to receive new robotic sorting arms from Recycleye. A third site will be named later this year. The push comes ahead of the UK government’s Simpler Recycling policy, due in March 2026, which will require all households in England to have kerbside carton recycling and businesses to separate specified recyclable materials. Awantika Chadha, sustainability manager at
Sorting trials in HolyGrail 2.0
HolyGrail moves to market adoption phase
HolyGrail 2030 is the next stage in the multi-partner European project to close the loop in post-consumer rigid packaging through the use of digital watermarks to improve sorting. Follow- ing the conclusion of HolyGrail 2.0, the initiative will now focus on market adoption programmes. Early-adopter market demonstra- tions will be launched in Belgium (for flexible PP food packaging) and Germany (for rigid PP food packaging), with the objective of further scaling the technology and allowing participants access to dedicated recycled PP food-grade materials. The last trials in HolyGrail 2.0 demonstrated the potential of digital watermarks for accurately sorting post-consumer rigid household packaging, achieving sorting efficiency of 90% and higher. The trials were conducted at the Hündgen Entsorgung material recovery facility in Swisttal, Germany, and used technol- ogy developed by Digimarc and Pellenc ST.
to be discovered how much it will cost to push from “near-human” to “beyond-human” accuracy. In July, Tetra Pak said it is making further investment into the UK’s carton recycling capacity with the country’s first AI-powered optical sorting system. Although 75% paper, Tetra Pak’s cartons have a PE content of 20% (with aluminium making up the final 5%).
Developed by British startup Recycleye, the
Recycleye QuantiSort system has been installed at Cumbria Waste Management’s materials recycling facility (MRF) in Carlisle. Using AI and high-defini- tion cameras, it identifies beverage cartons in mixed waste and ejects them with pneumatic valves. Tetra Pak says the system delivers over 98% purity and can be trained more efficiently than older methods, enabling a significant boost in processing capacity. The Carlisle facility serves a wide area of northwest England, including Cumberland,
32 PLASTICS RECYCLING WORLD | September 2025
Tetra Pak UK, said: “This announcement of another upgrade to a UK MRF demonstrates our commit- ment to improving the UK’s recycling infrastructure and transforming the UK’s circular economy. We are particularly pleased to be helping to implement AI-powered optical sorter technology in the UK for the first time. We hope this collaboration with Cumbria Waste Management and Recycleye will act as a blueprint for the upgrade of food and beverage carton sorting capabilities across the UK.” Victor Dewulf, co-founder and CEO of Recy-
cleye, said: “We are proud to collaborate with Tetra Pak and Cumbria Waste to deliver Recycleye QuantiSort for bulk recovery of food and beverage cartons, using a cutting-edge AI optical sorter innovation. This project demonstrates the capabil- ity of AI to detect and recover items such as food and beverage cartons, offering MRFs a flexible technology to adapt to changing material streams.”
Computer vision Recycleye says QuantiSort is an AI-powered optical sorting system engineered to achieve “near-human” accuracy at high speeds, processing up to 1,000 ejections per minute depending on the width of the conveyor belt. It uses advanced computer vision, powered by the CogniScan AI system trained on over a billion waste images, to distinguish objects based on colour, texture, shape and contextual cues. This enables it to identify items made of similar materials, or even multi-material objects such as batteries and PCBs. Once detected, items are swiftly and accurately removed from the waste stream using a pneumatic ejection system, devel- oped in collaboration with MSS. Recycleye says the combination of sophisticated AI vision and preci- sion ejection delivers unprecedented purity and granularity in sorting, maximising material value. Launched in April 2024, Tomra’s Gain Next (styled “GAINnext”) cracked one of the industry’s toughest challenges – distinguishing food-grade from non-food-grade packaging made from the
www.plasticsrecyclingworld.com
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