Sustainability - In late September, start-up PAKT will begin a pilot with online supermarket Picnic. Over the course of 10 weeks, they will collect, sort and clean all glass from customers in Alphen a/d Rijn.
Why do we only recycle beer bottles and not peanut butter, bean, or sauce jars? This is precisely the question Thijs Wester, founder of PAKT, has been asking himself. That culminated in a company that aims to make reusable glass containers the norm.
Glass manufacturing takes a lot of energy and is a polluting and expensive process. With the exception of beer bottles, glass containers are destroyed after single use. One person throws away an average of 27 kilograms of glass each year in the Netherlands. While glass actually has many advantages. The packaging form is ideal for food: it is transparent and does not impart any smell, color or flavor to the food it contains. In addition, you can reuse glass indefinitely, without the quality deteriorating.
So, mechanical engineering student Thijs Wester (23) thought recycling glass seemed like an obvious solution. Yet few serious initiatives are dedicated to recycling glass jars found in supermarkets right now. “And that while we are really good at getting things to consumers as quickly as we can. Distribution centers are fully robotized. What we are not yet good at is taking that packaging back from B to A. That kind of technology is only being used at the moment to get products to consumers as fast as possible and that encourages a linear economy. A real shame, in our opinion.”
Moreover, we have a beer industry that serves as a great example of how things could be done. “Of all the glass containers in the supermarket, it’s only beer bottles that are currently being recycled. One of the reasons is because consumers don’t buy a crate of peanut butter. Consequently, a peanut butter manufacturer does not have enough volume to set up this kind of system on its own. And supermarkets are not keen on pallets full of glass that they have to sort out in backrooms. On top of that, things shouldn’t get be made too complicated for the consumer either, in that you can return one jar but not a different one.”
“We are really good at getting things to consumers as quickly as we can … That kind of technology is only being used at the moment to get products to consumers as fast as possible. and that encourages a linear economy. A real shame, in our opinion.”
In other words, a middle man is sorely needed. If it’s up to Wester, that will materialize in the form of PAKT: an intermediary party that picks up consumers’ unsorted glass from supermarkets, sorts it out, cleans it and delivers it back to the parties on a pallet level. “We want to make return logistics easier. The supermarket can pack all the glass into one crate. We do the sorting using robotics We would like to make it as easy as possible for the consumer, retailers and manufacturers.”
A lot of aspects of the process, such as return logistics, cleaning the glass and quality inspection, are already happening. The focus of PAKT is on the sorting module that sorts out the mixed pallets of glass. I.e., how you go from unsorted to sorted glass that can then be sent into the washing process.
The team accomplishes this through the use of modern vision systems. Machine vision is a technology used for image-based analysis for such applications as automatic sorting, pick and place and inspections.
The team does this by combining state-of-the-art vision and AI technologies with smart mechatronics. “We have been able to automate processes for quite a long time already. However, that involves homogeneous product streams. The challenge for us is in transporting and automating a wide variety of packaging types in numerous shapes and sizes.” This concept is also known as high mix, low volume. As well as being able to recognize, sort and locate packaging, this technology can also do quality analysis. For this, PAKT is collaborating with Newcircle Technologies, another Eindhoven start-up that is focusing on modern vision algorithms in industrial applications.
The up-and-coming entrepreneur is proud of the fact that his company is now sitting at the negotiating table of major manufacturers and retailers. Later this month, PAKT is starting ‘Project CLEAN’ with the online supermarket Picnic and five glass manufacturers. For ten weeks, all glass from customers in the Alphen a/d Rijn region will be collected by Picnic and sorted out by a prototype sorting machine at PAKT’s hub. They are intentionally focusing on e-commerce first. Online supermarkets or delivery services are well suited to return logistics. Collecting glass and as such, contributing to the transition towards a circular economy also fits in well with Picnic. When Picnic delivers groceries, customers can already hand over refundable bottles, DHL packages and batteries to the delivery drivers. From now on, the online supermarket is offering an extra service by also taking back glass containers.
On the bright side, a lot of new legislation on (plastic) packaging is coming up fro the European Union and the new price of glass is also rising very fast. “We hope to end up just below the retail price.” What’s more, supermarkets and companies in the food industry are very busy trying to reduce their carbon footprint and are interested in alternatives to current packaging. Despite the good intentions, Wester does note that there is still a great deal of work to do. ” One concrete example is the type of label that is used. Some manufacturers use washable labels, while others still use stickers. Standardization is needed in these areas to make the process genuinely efficient and inexpensive. That’s why we involve industry as much as possible in Project CLEAN, so that they can see for themselves what kind of challenges we are dealing with and so we can also look for the best solutions together.”
In five years’ time, PAKT aims to provide a nationwide system for glass collection. Wester: “Sustainability is being heavily promoted these days, but it is only an option for a select group of people. A circular economy is a total alternative and offers far more opportunities. I think the most important thing is that our solution is easy and readily available to everyone.”
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