Wyllie Recycling Ltd, a leading family-owned recycling businesses in Scotland, has invested in three of TOMRA’s AUTOSORT™ optical sorters as part of a £3 million upgrade at the company’s mixed containers MRF in Perth.
Designed specifically for local authority contracts, 20,000 tonnes of mixed containers are processed annually at the MRF, specifically aluminium and steel cans, plastic bottles and pots, tubs and trays.
The Perth site also recycles other plastics, wood, cardboard and newsprint, and it incorporates Scotland’s largest secure drinks destruction facility.
Wyllie Recycling has contracts with seven local authorities in Scotland with a combined population of over 1 million people, representing approximately 20% of the Scottish market.
Each local authority’s material is collected by the Wyllie Recycling’s own fleet of walking-floor trailers before being delivered to the MRF for processing using three AUTOSORTTM units from TOMRA. These were installed in January 2024 and are programmed to target six grades of polymers, including HDPE (natural and jazz), PET (clear and jazz), and PP pots, tubs and trays. The sorting line operates at a rate of five tonnes per hour (TPH).
Prior to investing in the AUTOSORTTM units, Wyllie Recycling used magnets and eddy currents to sort aluminium and steel cans, but the recovered polymers were just sold as mixed plastic bottles (MPB).
John Gilmour, Commercial Manager at Wyllie Recycling, comments: “When we began planning our MRF upgrade, we wanted a proven technology which would be reliable, affordable and, critically, could produce the material quality requirements of our buyers. TOMRA’s AUTOSORTTM units deliver on all of these counts. We are achieving excellent tonnage throughput and high purity levels, without incurring any additional labour costs. We’ve gone from selling our recovered polymers as mixed plastic bottles to producing six grades of exceptionally high purity food-grade products, enabling us to fulfil our buyers’ demand for this material.”
Steven Walsh, Area Sales Manager UK at TOMRA Recycling Sorting, adds: “Wyllie Recycling offers a unique service solution for mixed containers from local authorities and it’s great to see the results that our technology is achieving in this particular application. Our partnership with Wyllie Recycling was built over a long development phase and I’m delighted not only to see the project come to fruition, but to see them make such a positive impact on the Scottish domestic recycling market.”
The AUTOSORTTM is a multifunctional sorting system which uses advanced sensors, including NIR (near infrared) and optionally MIR (mid infrared) spectroscopy, to precisely identify different polymer types. TOMRA says this allows for much more accurate sorting than traditional methods which rely on colour or shape recognition alone. It is capable of processing large volumes of material quickly and its compact and ultra-flexible design mean it can integrate seamlessly into both new and existing plants.
