Page 72 - Packaging News magazine March_April 2023

MACHINERY MATTERS MARCH – APRIL 2023 ■ 12
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“The Industry 4.0 solution also tracks and monitors all equipment, including major processing lines for sorting and washing, extrusion and decontamination, auxiliary machinery, and plant services.”
Recycling plants deal with hundreds of tonnes of recycled plastic every day – all of which need to meet the stringent monitoring and traceability standards set out by corporates and lawmakers. With so many processes and data points involved, a highly advanced Industry 4.0 solution is needed to ‘connect the dots’.
Getting recycling back on track with Industry 4.0
Roberts explains that to ensure that the recycled products are safe for consumers and meet the stringent standards set by corporates and lawmakers, an effective Industry 4.0 solution needed to be implemented across the plant’s production line for monitoring and traceability purposes.
This requirement resulted in Circular Plastics Australia contracting Zi-Argus to deploy their redundant, clustered cloud-connected solution known as Symbiont to connect all plant systems from infeed to output. This includes the weight of material entering the facility, tracked throughout the process to output of the final product.
“The Industry 4.0 solution also tracks and monitors all equipment, including major processing lines for sorting and washing, extrusion and decontamination, auxiliary machinery, and plant services,” said Roberts, noting that this
Australia has set the goal for 70 per cent of plastic packaging to be recycled or composted by 2025, and for unnecessary single-use plastic packaging to be phased out. However, of the 1.1 million tonnes of plastic packaging placed on the market in 2020, only 16 per cent (or 179,000 tonnes) was recovered, according to data published in the Australian Packaging Covenant Organisation’s (APCO) Collective Impact Report in November 2021.
To help the country meet its recycling targets, the NSW government introduced the Waste Less, Recycle More initiative, which dedicated $337 million in funding to large-scale recycling projects.
One worthy recipient of this initiative is Circular Plastics Australia PET (a joint venture between Pact Group, Cleanaway Waste Management, Asahi Beverages and Coca-Cola Europacific Partners), which with the additional support of
the Australian government’s Recycling Modernisation Fund, constructed a new PET plastic recycling facility in Albury, NSW.
The $50 million facility, operated by Pact, is capable of processing the equivalent of around one billion 600ml PET plastic beverage bottles – collected via Container Deposit Schemes and kerbside recycling each year.
The bottles are then converted into more than 20,000 tonnes of high-quality plastic resin using state-of-the- art sorting, washing, decontamination and extrusion technology. The food-grade recycled PET (rPET) produced by the facility will be used to manufacture new beverage and
water bottles for Asahi Beverages and Coca-Cola Europacific Partners, and new food and beverage packaging for Pact Group’s customers.
Cloud deployment ensures production line traceability
The large-scale recycling of PET plastic bottles and packaging plays a crucial role in helping Australia to reduce its waste and become more sustainable. So says Richard Roberts, national Industry 4.0 operations manager at Zi-Argus Australia, and member of Open IIoT – a group that includes SMC Corporation ANZ, Nord Drivesystems, Balluff, Beckhoff Automation and Kuka Robotics.
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