La salle de presse

TOMRA Sorting Recycling is set to improve its growing sales and service further after its new state-of-the-art customer center in Mülheim-Kärlich, Germany, was officially opened. Eveline Lemke, minister of economy, climate protection, energy and land use planning in Rhineland-Palatinate, performed the ceremony with Dr Volker Rehrmann, head of TOMRA Sorting Solutions, and Tom Eng, head of TOMRA Sorting Recycling. The group is a global sensor-based sorting systems designer and manufacturer, specializing in supplying the food and mining industries, in addition to recycling equipment. About 70 people attended the 1000 square meter customer center’s official opening, which included a tour and demonstration of TOMRA Sorting Recycling systems.

Ms Lemke stated that the new TOMRA Sorting Recycling customer center itself represented best practice in recycling management. She said: “As it is built from sustainable materials and is extremely energy efficient, the center echoes the company’s business, as TOMRA’s sensor-based sorting technology means valuable resources are recovered and re-used. Demand for this closed loop recycling management and correctly sorted separation, which TOMRA’s technology makes possible, is potentially huge. Thanks to modern systems like these, Germany leads the way in Europe when it comes to waste recovery. TOMRA is at the forefront of this, as it provides outstanding expertise, which also contributes significantly to the overall economic strength of the Central Rhineland region.”

The new building stands on the site of the existing TOMRA Sorting Recycling offices and test center. The latter is the largest facility of its kind in the industry, offering full sorting capabilities and enabling customers to run trials, involving the company’s machines handling a wide variety of materials. Containing offices and four meeting rooms, the customer center includes a training room and a research and development laboratory, where test results can be analyzed in detail. It also has facilities where customers can leave their belongings and change their clothes to use the test site next door, and provides almost 60 additional car parking spaces.

The building symbolizes TOMRA Sorting´s customer orientation

Eng said: “We’re delighted with our new center, which contains unsurpassed facilities, delivering an expanded and improved working environment for customers and test center staff. The building symbolizes that customers remain the very highest priority across our business, as we strive to provide them with tailored solutions meeting their unique needs exactly, from the very wide range of technologies we have available. The opening means the dedicated customer facilities at the Mülheim-Kärlich site are now almost entirely separate from the production and administrative areas.”
TOMRA Sorting Recycling says its TITECH range of advanced automated sorting systems, for various waste and metal material streams, delivers clear commercial, legislative and environmental benefits. The machines recover clean material fractions, delivering significantly higher yields and increased value from the input material than traditional methods, such as dense media separation or manual sorting. Over 700,000 tons of metals alone are recovered each year by TOMRA equipment.

Officially designated a ‘green building’

Describing one of the new customer center’s distinctions, Dr Rehrmann, said: “We’re very proud of the fact that our new facility has been officially designated a ‘green building’. Qualifying criteria for this accreditation in Rhineland-Palatinate include energy use at least 25 per cent lower than the already strict German standard. They also include requirements covering water efficiency, use of materials and resources, and ecological standards inside the building. This designation is highly appropriate, as we at TOMRAsee ourselves as leading the resource revolution. We’re conscious that the world’s population is set to rise by 30 per cent over the next 40 years. This makes the smart solutions for resource productivity that we produce critical, as they enable customers to obtain more, use less and re-use, which ensures the planet is more sustainable.”