Glass recovering revolution: high performance optical sorter for glass collection from waste
The amount of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) in the EU28 reached 245 million tons in 2012. Nowadays, Europe directives for
waste management are more restrictive each year (e.g Landfill Directive 1999/31/EC), but unfortunately, landfill disposal still
represents 34% of total MSW generated. On the other hand, citizen awareness as well as the high fees operators pay for
landfill disposal, have helped to greatly increase the percentage for recycling from 18% in 1995, to 42% in 2012.

However, 40% of all the glass waste ends up in mixed MSW plants (which typically contain 7% of glass). Instead of being
disposed of in selective-waste collection, it ends up in landfills or is composted/incinerated with the remnant waste.

We have developed SEEGLASS, a high performance optical sorter based on computer vision and a pneumatic rejection
system. Our aim is to solve this non-environmentally friendly problem, while also offering our end-users additional revenues
with this recovered material, which is not being exploited now (49€/tn glass). In addition, extracting this glass, will allow the
treatment plants to significantly reduce costs from waste disposal fees (50€/Tonne EU average and rising). Payback for
customers is estimated in only 19 months.

With this project we will (i) construct pre-conditioning process line, (ii) optimise our current SEEGLASS computer vision
system as well as its mechanical and pneumatic design, to reach 80% glass recovery, with 99% purity, (iii) integrate both,
the process line and the glass sorter solution into a demonstrator system, and (iv) validate its feasibility in-house with real
MSW coming from different countries, as well as carry-out an 24/7 end-user validation.

We, PICVISA, will be the first company to recover the glass fraction in refined MSW worldwide (the niche market exists
worldwide) selling Turn-key installations or only SEEGLASS units, contributing to a disruptive change in the sector.