Making a statement at their facility in Bursa Kestel, Burkasan Chairman Vedat Kılıç said, “We aim to produce the best raw material from waste plastics by using TOMRA’s optical sorting machines.
Technological equipment was of great importance to reach the product quality and capacity we targeted in our new facility where we tried to catch the Industry 4.0 revolution.
In this direction, we preferred the most advanced sorting solutions with a globally leading solution partner such as TOMRA, especially when targeting 99 percent purity rates and offering our products to important global companies.”
Kılıç underlined that Burkasan Waste Management and Environmental Consultancy is Bursa’s first and one of the first in Turkey as a licensed recycling company; “Since 2005, our sector continued its activities with the concept of scrap until the packaging waste regulation published by the Ministry of Environment and even to a certain extent.
For this reason, we are trying to contribute to the development of our sector in Turkey as a professional waste management company that manages all processes by breaking the scrap dealer concept in the sector.
Establishing Turkey’s first refrigerator crushing plant was a good example of this. Now we are breaking new ground again with plastic recycling. For the first time, plastic bottles equivalent to the original will be produced from waste plastic in our facility.”
“Turkey’s recycling sector continues to grow”
Giving information about the recycling sector in Turkey, Vedat Kılıç said: “In Turkey, an average of 75-80 million tons of waste is generated annually in the industry. In terms of domestic waste, the daily amount of waste per person in Turkey is around 1.1 kg. Accordingly, 33-35 million tons of waste is generated annually in terms of domestic waste.
These volumes in domestic waste include 7-8 million tons of recyclable wastes such as metal, glass, plastic and aluminum, with 1 -1.5 percent of the total weight being HDPE. Unfortunately, a maximum of 1-1.5 million tons of this waste can be collected, transformed and recycled into the economy.
6-6.5 million tons are still mixed with garbage without being recycled. The economic equivalent of this situation in TL terms is a serious economic value of approximately 8-10 billion TL annually and a great loss for our sector.
While this is the case and the recycling sector is developing in Turkey, we are importing waste as raw material. On the other hand, despite the shortage of raw materials, the recycling sector in Turkey continues to grow.
It is important to use sorting technologies both to continue the development with automation, to provide the ideal recovery rates from limited raw materials and to obtain high purity end product quality.
For this reason, we have invested in TOMRA’s leading optical sorting technologies in order to achieve our goals. The high efficiency we achieve thanks to the low rejection advantage of TOMRA machines and more recovery is a factor that also increases our profitability.”
“There is a need for investments in facilities that will sort and recycle packaging at high capacities”
Stating that they have invested 120 million TL in the waste management sector in the last five years, Vedat Kılıç, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Burkasan, drew attention to the mandatory deposit application that will start in 2021; “Since waste collection rates will increase rapidly in our country with this application, there is a need for facility investments that will separate and recycle the beverage packaging to be collected with high capacities.
Therefore, we designed our new facility by considering the requirements of the deposit system. This is one of the reasons why we preferred TOMRA machines. We aimed to be ready for future periods with the latest technology investment.”
Vedat Kılıç mentioned that Burkasan manages around 15 thousand tons of waste per month with the new facility investment; “In our new plastic recycling facility, we aim to process 2,500 tons of waste material per month and obtain a minimum of 1,500 tons of product.
It is very difficult to reach these targets with manual sorting. Even if you employ a large number of employees, it is not possible to reach this capacity and high purity product quality with manpower when you do not benefit from automation. Especially considering the pandemic process and social distancing rules, manual sorting is a very challenging and costly method and cannot guarantee product quality. With TOMRA sorting machines, we overcome all these difficulties.
While providing products to our strong customers on the global platform, we are very sensitive in quality and quality control. With TOMRA, we can ensure 99 percent purity.”
TOMRA AUTOSORT® is located at the beginning of the line at the Burkasan facility after pre-sorting processes. After machines such as bale opening, magnet, eddy current and ballistic separator, the actual sorting is done by TOMRA AUTOSORT® machines.
For the final sorting of the materials processed in the crushing-washing line, TOMRA AUTOSORT® FLAKE is used in the final stage of mixed plastics processed in the crushing-washing line. It is positioned further down the line to perform the deburring task. It provides sorting by color, metal and polymer type while removing even the smallest pieces of foreign matter.
It successfully combines color, advanced material knowledge and metal object detection simultaneously. It optimizes deburring applications with maximum uptime regardless of grain size.
Serkan Orhan, TOMRA Sorting Recycling Turkey and Middle East Sales Manager, said; “TOMRA AUTOSORT®, with its proven FLYING BEAM® technology, offers higher performance and operational efficiency while guaranteeing a perfect homogeneous light distribution for better detection and sorting across the entire belt. It enables the detection of materials that cannot be detected in manual sorting and further increases the purity levels of sorting.”