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Waste Sorting Plants

Parini srl, thanks to three decades of experience in the waste sorting business, both as a manufacturer of waste sorting machinery and as supplier of turnkey waste sorting facilities, offers its Customers a wide specific know-how in the industry. This experience gained over the years in the field allows us to follow the Customer from the definition of the specifications and the preliminary study of the plant, to the final design and the construction, until the installation and the after-sales support.

All the machines (ballistic separators, air separators, drum screens, conveyors …) and plants are in fact designed in-house thanks to 2D and 3D CAD, then manufactured in our headquarter in Italy (high-definition plasma cutting, welding according to WPS specifications, in-house painting booth…), pre-assembled and then shipped worldwide.
This allows us to offer machines and systems for the waste selection with:

  • high degree of flexibility;
  • proven reliability;
  • reduced and easy maintenance;
  • competitive costs.

The types and variants of waste sorting plants are almost endless and is impossible to give a brief complete overview. Nowadays it is possible to carry out the separation, more or less automatic, of different types of waste:

transparent PET, light-blue PET, colored PET, transparent HDPE, colored HDPE, LDPE, Tetrapak, PP, PS, iron, aluminum, paper and cardboard, glass, wood, RDF, PVC …

There are also other types of plants that don’t treat the materials listed above, typically coming from packaging and separate collection, but have some machines in common with the waste sorting plants. Examples include the treatment of biowaste (organic fraction of MSW), treatment of hospital waste, refining of compost, recovery of used tires (ELTs) etc …

waste sorting plant
The waste sorting plants can be divided according to the degree of automation (manual waste sorting plants, semi-automatic waste sorting plants, automatic waste sorting plants), according to the incoming flow rate (t/h) and naturally depending on the type of incoming waste (municipal solid waste (MSW), industrial waste (C&I), paper/cardboard, plastic, separate collection, single stream…). Below is an overview, based on the degree of automation, of the Parini srl waste sorting plants, with cost and personnel estimates.

Manual waste sorting plant

This type of waste sorting plant its based on a mainly manual waste sorting, assisted by machines at certain stages of the process. These plants meet the needs of small towns or countries in the developing world.

manual waste sorting plant

Treatment capacity: from 1 to 3.5 t/h
Personnel employed: from 6 to 12
Initial investment: from 200.000 to 500.000 €

Usually in these systems there is always a waste selection based on the shape/size carried out with a machine, heart of the sorting plant, such as one or more ballistic separators or drum screens, placed at the beginning of the line. Subsequently, in a sorting cabin (or platform), the personnel performs the manual sorting of waste on a belt conveyor.

manual waste sorting plant

These systems are usually designed to process a waste input from 1 to 3.5 t/h and require an limited initial investment in machinery; despite this, these plants allow efficient separation of waste, obtaining different streams of waste as output with a good degree of purity. Depending on the specifications on the selected waste and the quality/quantity of the input waste, the number of employees may vary, ensuring flexibility in the management of the plant.

Parini srl is able to design, build and deliver turnkey manual sorting plants.

Semi-automatic waste sorting plant

This type of waste sorting plant provides, compared to the previous manual case, the inclusion of some machines aimed to decrease the number of staff employed and/or improve the quality of the selected waste fractions.

semi-automatic waste sorting plant

Treatment capacity: from 2.5 to 6 t/h
Personnel employed: from 8 to 20
Initial investment: from 500.000 to 700.000 €

In addition to essential machinery at the sorting line beginning, such as a drum screen that removes the organic and/or separates by size or a ballistic separator which separates the light and flat and the heavy and rolling fractions from powders, in this type of plant there could be air separators to separate from the flow plastic films and light packaging, storage conveyors, non-ferrous separators, optic separators, balers … Each of these machines leads to a more automatic process, allowing to decrease the number of employees in both phases of selection and handling / management of waste.

Semi-automatic waste sorting plant

Parini srl is able to supply turnkey also this type of system. In case of inclusion of machines not directly produced by us (as optic separators or non-ferrous separator) agreements and business contacts with leading European manufacturers developed during 30 years of activity enable us to provide the complete plant. The design flexibility of Parini srl allows to design and build parts completing these machines, like hoppers, support structures, feeding chain conveyors for shredders and balers or fast conveyors and hoods for optical separators.

Automatic waste sorting plant

This type of waste sorting plant is the most complex and technologically advanced. In large towns and cities the amount of waste to be processed and the constraints on the quality of the waste selection requires the study and implementation of systems with a high technological level with minimum usage of manpower.

Automatic waste sorting plant

Treatment capacity: from 6 to 30+ t/h
Personnel employed: from 0 to 45+
Initial investment: from 1.000.000 to 20.000.000 €

This type of plant allows to minimize the use of personnel on the line, obtaining high recovery of secondary raw materials. Thanks to automatic machines and sensors of various types (NIR, ECS …) output streams can be various and of high quality. Obviously the initial investment is considerable, repaid however by low labor costs and great production capacity.


From the necessary input data for the study of the waste sorting plant, such as the characteristics of the incoming stream, the type of selection to be made and the available space, Parini srl designs starting from the flow diagram of the process up to the definition and realization of the smallest detail.

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