Colour Measurement of Recyclates

Improve the sorting, characterising, and use of recyclates to reduce waste.

Colour Measurement of Recyclates


Control colour quality of your recycled materials to meet your customer's demand while reducing plastic waste

The worldwide production of plastic products has been increasing for years and this trend is expected to continue in a near future. At the same time, the amount of plastic waste grows dramatically. With increasing awareness of environmental preservation, plastic recycling is one of the most significant initiatives for our society. Based on the EU resolution, all plastic materials should be recyclable by 2030. The plastic industry has been making extensive effort to develop technologies for reducing plastic waste and better sorting and reusing plastics.
 

Recyclates represents a huge commercial opportunity for the sector in improving products and processes, and in offering customers products that utilise recycled plastics.


Recyclates are usually a mixture of different plastic types, of inhomogeneous colours, contaminated by foreign objects. All this has a significant impact on recyclate's quality and value. Colour is one of the most important factors in this respect.

As a solution provider to the plastic industry, Konica Minolta Measuring Instruments offer customers accurate and traceable solutions for sorting, characterising, and reusing recycled polymers. Our experts can help you establish systems for minimising waste, minimising losses, and improving your tolerances. This can be everything from characterising the colour of inhomogeneous plastic samples or products, to helping companies maintain colour accuracy whilst integrating their own production waste or a percentage of recycled polymers. The appetite for recycled plastics is huge and the possibilities for producing quality products are only just beginning to be explored.

Konica Minolta has a dedicated team of experts responsible for implementing, training, optimising, and customising systems for colour formulation and digital colour data communication. Our experts can help your teams to establish digital colour standards and colour difference tolerances that you can share with your supply chain partners. You can leverage the experience of our application teams to quickly establish repeatable, best-practice processes for colour and appearance measurement and control.

Konica Minolta benchtop spectrophotometers are versatile, accurate, and traceable. By improving accuracy of the colour data for regrind, the industry can improve outcomes and tolerances for the products that they produce.

Konica Minolta group company SPECIM is at the forefront of hyperspectral vision systems, providing the recycling industry with inline solutions for identifying and sorting plastic products of different types and colours. Improving the quality of sorting within the recycling process is a crucial step in improving the possibilities of the recycled product.

Instruments

Instruments

CM-36dGV Portable Spectrophotometer

Vertically aligned benchtop spectrophotometer for measuring of solid, pellet, regrind materials, either opaque or transparent. An ideal solution for plastic companies wanting to generate accurate and traceable colour data. 

CM-26dG Portable Spectrophotometer

Portable sphere type spectrophotometer designed for user friendly colour measurement of flat or large samples. This device delivers measurement data including (SCI) and excluding (SCE) surface conditions in one measurement sequence, at ultra-high speed.
 

SPECIM FX Hyperspectral cameras

The SPECIM FX series of in-line hyperspectral imaging cameras can be used for identification of plastics by colour and type as part of a sorting system. The FX-50 camera has even proven capable of sorting black PS, PE, PP, ABS, and PVC.

Applications

Applications

SPECIM Plastic recycling with Hyperspectral Imaging

The FX inline Hyperspectral imaging systems can be integrated into high throughput material sorting lines, categorising and sorting plastic recycling to help recyclers achieve the best quality product.

Read the Technical Notes
SPECIM FX series hyperspectral cameras: FX 10, FX 17, and FX 50

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