Industry 4.0 solution helps meet recycling goals

Australia has set the goal for 70% 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% or 179,000 tonnes was recovered, according to data published in the Australian Packaging Covenant Organisation’s 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 such worthy recipient of this initiative is Circular Plastics Australia (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 1 billion 600 mL 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.

“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,” said Richard Roberts, National Industry 4.0 Operations Manager at ZI-Argus Australia and member of the Open IIoT Group (a cohort that includes SMC Corporation Australia New Zealand, NORD Drivesystems, Balluff, Beckhoff Automation and KUKA Robotics).

“But 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,” he said.

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. This enables the automated collection of data for raw material consumption, production and scrap,” Roberts said. “Its sophisticated design is configured with redundant servers, such that in the event of an outage the services will recover appropriately by failing over to a redundant service or server — which is a major benefit in a high-output production facility such as the recycling plant.”

Symbiont’s endpoints are connected to a variety of PLCs, controllers, APIs, databases and weigh controllers, creating a central data lake of 3000 data points. The solution enables cloud access from anywhere and provides plant workers with real-time dashboards and reports for production status, monitoring, historical analytics (up to 10 years’ worth) and insights.

Understanding that equipment monitoring is a crucial feature of IIoT integration, Symbiont includes custom alerts across all plant systems to provide warnings, escalations and detailed information on active issues. The data shared by these alerts allows operators, plant managers, group managers — and even the CEO if needed — to be informed and visually aware of what is happening in their plant for more effective production and system utilisation.

Other benefits of IIoT connectivity experienced by Circular Plastics Australia in their plant include data visualisation for product traceability and audit/verification purposes, and a traceability chain that covers feedstock material all the way to resin output. This chain is then scalable to include additional upstream and downstream data sources.

“Many manufacturers do not realise that cloud deployment and software are essential components to ensure continued efficiency in the case of system failure,” Roberts said. “Symbiont is unique in that it is programmed with a self-healing mindset, and therefore services can self-heal autonomously in the event of exemptions in the code or failures. This promotes minimal downtime of each individual service.”