Activities

At Indaver in Willebroek, non-hazardous waste that has been collected selectively is treated with a view to maximising recycling and useful application. This involves the following: 

  • Sorting and pressing PMD (Plastic packaging, Metal packaging, Drinks cartons)
  • Sorting and pressing plastics 
  • Transferring paper and cardboard 
  • Transferring industrial and bulky waste  
  • Transferring household waste 
  • Pre-treating difficult-to-recycle plastics for chemical recycling   

Indaver Plastics Recycling nv (IPR) is responsible for the transfer, pre-treatment and sorting operations. The offices are located at the Indaver site in Willebroek. 

Indaver Logistics nv handles the transport of non-hazardous waste. The offices, vehicle fleet and container park of Indaver Logistics are located at the Indaver site in Willebroek.  
Indaver Logistics serves customers all over Belgium and also has a number of customers in Luxembourg and the Netherlands. 

Operations

Sorting of PMD for recycling


Indaver Plastics Recycling (IPR) sorts the selectively collected household packaging waste, better known as PMD (Plastic packaging, Metal packaging, Drinks cartons), of 3 million residents of Flanders in a high-tech PMD sorting facility. On an annual basis, the new PMD facility treats 65,000 tonnes of waste, but its capacity can still be increased. 
The PMD waste includes:    

  • all forms of plastic packaging such as bottles, flasks, hard plastic packaging, trays and plastic films, salad bags, mushroom containers or the film around multipacks of water and milk, polystyrene packaging and PET trays
  • metal packaging such as tin cans, aluminium trays, drinks cans and aerosols from foods and cosmetics
  • drinks cartons

The sorting line sorts household packaging waste in several machine steps. With the backing of manual quality checks at the end of the process, this facility produces 16 clean streams. These sorted packaging materials serve as valuable raw materials for new products.  The residues are transported to another facility where, after intense sorting, they are converted into sources of energy for non-specialised incinerators such as cement kilns and lime kilns.

Partner for Flemish public authorities

Every year, the facility in Willebroek treats 65,000 tonnes of PMD waste from public authorities that collect it via kerbside collection and recycling centres. Indaver is therefore a reliable partner to local authorities, intermunicipal organisations, cities and municipalities, and one that supports them in their transition to a circular economy.

Partner for the packaging industry

IPR sorts PMD waste on behalf of Fost Plus. Fost Plus is the central organisation responsible for the selective collection, sorting and recycling of household packaging waste in Belgium. Fost Plus works closely with Indaver’s sorting centre in Willebroek. This is also the organisation that defines the specific characteristics of PMD waste and the quality requirements for outgoing material streams.  IPR weighs and labels the bales (with information such as sorting centre name, material type, date and the shift that was working at the time)  so that the materials are traceable at all times.

 

Artificial intelligence improves sorting quality

Indaver has worked with Fost Plus to investigate whether artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to monitor the quality of the sorted materials. If sorted materials are scanned for sorting errors at the end of the process, a visual inspection of the quality of the bales becomes unnecessary. That information may also be useful for special scanners. Through machine learning, they will become even better at recognising materials on the belt and the sorting process will become even more precise.
Read more on this topic: Artificial Intelligence as a tool for analysing sorting quality - Fost Plus

 

Preliminary treatment of recyclable plastics

Recyclable plastics from industry, such as plastic films, bags, big bags, plastic offcuts and monostreams of hard plastics are pre-treated (sorting, reducing, pressing) by IPR for recycling. Any interfering substances are removed from the incoming loads.

Preliminary treatment of plastics that are difficult to recycle

Difficult-to-recycle plastics from PMD waste (from our own facility and from other production or sorting facilities) will first be pre-treated at Indaver’s site in Willebroek before being treated further at our new Plastics2Chemicals facility in Antwerp. The first stage involves both polystyrene and polyolefins that require further treatment.  Using chemical recycling in our P2C facility, these plastics will be broken down into valuable raw materials for industry.
Construction of the pre-treatment plant will start in 2023. By 2024, the plant should be ready for operation.

Transfer 

Paper and cardboard, industrial waste, bulky waste and household waste are also transferred at this site. 
The household waste delivered is transferred in Willebroek and taken away to Indaver facilities for further treatment. From the incoming bulky and industrial waste, a number of streams are sorted and removed for further specific treatment. These include scrap, films and paper, etc.