Valorsul, a leading company in the environmental sector, manages the processing of approximately 850,000 tons of municipal waste annually in 19 municipalities in Greater Lisbon and the Western Region. The company selected STADLER for the design and installation of a significant upgrade and optimization of the sorting plant at its Centro de Triagem do Oeste, one of its two light packaging treatment facilities.

With this project, Valorsul aimed to increase the throughput capacity of the facility while maintaining the high purity of its outputs and simplifying its operation. António Afonso, Recycling Plant Manager at Valorsul, explains, "We chose STADLER because of the quality and detail of the studies they presented. Also, the visits we made to various facilities designed by STADLER allowed us to ascertain the quality of the equipment and its assembly."

New Plant Delivers Increased Throughput Capacity with High Purity Output:

The process begins with the incoming waste being fed into a bulky items sorting cabin and bag opener before going through two STADLER STT2000 ballistic separators that separate the flexible and 3D materials. Film recovery from the flexible output is improved with the use of a new aspiration system and STT2000 ballistic separators with forced ventilation.

Metals are recovered from the 3D materials through ballistic separation with new electromagnet and eddy current separators, sorted into ferrous and non-ferrous metals. Optical sorters recover PET bottles, HDPE, Tetra Pak, and a Plastic Mix. An optical sorter from the original plant is used for automatic quality control of the PET, HDPE, and Tetra Pak fractions.

"To increase the facility’s capacity while maintaining the high quality of the output, we have replaced the one ballistic separator in the original plant with two STT2000 ballistic separators, and we have installed larger capacity optical sorters featuring the latest technology. We have also included two new sorting cabins to simplify manual sorting and quality control," says Carlos Manchado Atienza, STADLER International Sales Director.