SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, Sep 22 (EUROPA PRESS) –
The container classification and selection plant of the Tenerife Environmental Complex (CAT), located in Arico, has been automated to increase its treatment capacity and improve the efficiency in the separation of this waste (bottles, cans and plastic tubs, cans of sodas, cartons, etc.).
The third vice president of the Cabildo de Tenerife and counselor for Social Action, Marián Franquet, and the island counselor for Sustainable Development and the Fight against Climate Change, Javier Rodríguez Medina, visited this plant this morning.
Together with representatives of Ecoembes, such as the manager of this entity in the Canary Islands, Alberto Fernández, and of the companies that have carried out the improvement works at the facility, Franquet and Rodríguez Medina were able to verify on-site the operation of the packaging waste plant with its new adaptation, works that have had a budget of more than 2.8 million euros.
Thus, since the beginning of the summer, it has gone from a manual process to an automatic one, increasing the treatment capacity. In this way, it has traveled from 2.66 to 4.7 tons / hour, although with the capacity to absorb higher treatment peaks, and can even reach more than 5 tons per hour. In annual terms, it will go from 6,000 tons per year to reach at least 15,600 and with the capacity to reach 19,000 tons.
Franquet highlighted “the important work carried out by Sinpromi, as manager of this packaging plant, one of the facilities that are part of the Environmental Complex, a key area for the Cabildo due to its condition of strategic infrastructure and of socio-economic interest for the island”, and valued the need to make continuous investments to improve the facilities of the site, “in addition to the essential task of awareness-raising, awareness-raising and environmental education actions.”
For his part, Rodríguez Medina recalled that the container classification and selection plant, “as it was, did not have sufficient technical capacity to treat the amount of packaging waste it received, which is increasing annually by figures of more than 12 % “, so” the works carried out have immediately increased the production and management capacity of the facilities, from 6,000 tons per year to more than 15,600 “. In this regard, the island councilor encouraged the citizens of Tenerife to continue separating waste at source.
The objective of this project has been to maximize the recovery of existing recyclable materials during the selection process of waste from selective municipal collection through the yellow container on the islands of Tenerife, La Gomera and El Hierro, which have respectively of 4,352, 145 and 121 containers in which 11,158,750 tons of light packaging were collected in 2020.
The renovated plant, whose design has been technically agreed with Ecoembes, the environmental organization that coordinates the recycling of packaging throughout Spain, within the framework of the agreement signed with the Cabildo and called Plan de Tenerife, has been adapted to current needs, improving significantly the recovery percentages with the effectiveness required for this type of facilities (minimum of 82%), and solving the obsolescence problems of the original plant, which was exceeded in its capacity.
The works, which have taken advantage of existing equipment, such as the trommel, the multimaterial press, the automatic film suction system or the ferrous and aluminum separators, modifying some conveyor belts arranged in the process lines, have installed the following new equipment: a shredder bag opener, a ballistic separator, two optical separators, an automatic sorting equipment, an inductive separator, an iron press, a bottle puncher, an automatic storage system and a high capacity multi-material press.
As a complement to these works, in June 2020 the unloading beach of this packaging waste sorting and sorting plant was completed. The work consisted mainly of expanding the so-called unloading beach (platform on which the packaging waste from the yellow container – bottles, cans and plastic tubs, soft drink cans, briks) is unloaded by about 300 square meters of surface for its subsequent processing in the packaging plant, which has provided a larger storage area, so as to allow the absorption of the increments of waste that enter this facility.
