China’s green machine optical sorter suppliers should be compared through measured results, not brochure speed. For mixed plastics, a practical tender benchmark is 1–10 t/h, depending on feed density, belt width, and contamination. Buyers should request purity above 90% and recovery above 85% under a defined test recipe.
These figures are benchmarks, not guarantees. The European Commission’s Best Available Techniques Reference Document for Waste Treatment stresses that feed preparation and process control strongly affect separation performance.
Independent trials should record three shifts, not one clean sample. The 2023 US EPA National Recycling Strategy highlights contamination as a major barrier to material quality, making feed composition essential in supplier comparisons. At 5 t/h, operators should weigh input, accepted output, rejected output, and moisture.
2%
A 2% weighing error can distort recovery results.
For uptime, 90–95% scheduled availability is a sensible procurement target, excluding planned maintenance. The European Environment Agency’s recycling assessments also support transparent, comparable measurement across facilities.
Ask for:
Sensor cleaning time, air-pressure stability, false-rejection rates, and spare-part response.
A sorter may reach 10 t/h briefly, then lose accuracy when dust rises. That weakness is often missing from demonstrations.
Real performance needs evidence from similar waste streams, electricity records, maintenance logs, and verified laboratory sampling.