The food industry has been under pressure from various sources to reduce packaging and reduce waste. As the UK's waste regulator has highlighted, there are some companies who are not delivering on this.

A food depackaging system can be used for any food that cannot be sent to a food bank or charity. The process of depackaging should be applied to food that is past its sell-by date if it cannot be used in any other way.

Food waste depackaging is a process that removes the packaging of the food and reuses it for other purposes.

Most of the equipment now on the market is available on a wide range of products.

There are a number of newcomers, and although the traditional suppliers have modified their existing equipment to be able to achieve this duty, much better purpose built depacking machines are now available.

New techniques have been found by combining multiple depackaging functions into one stage.

New designs have been developed which reduce the energy cost, increase reliability, and remove any plastic waste from the incoming organic waste stream, while not creating additional microplastics.

We have seen how separation can be achieved by using physical separation in “vortex” and “turbo” systems. However, these two methods are now used in the best equipment as part of a multi-function single unit. The use of combined simultaneous water and air separation is a new and exciting development which by the avoidance of size reduction allows the subsequent use of ballistic separation and hence the output of a valuable recycled plastic product which is in demand as manufacturers seek to avoid single use plastic taxes by adding recycled resin to their products.

The old way of grinding, shredding and milling is now redundant. Newer, purpose-designed systems now exist that are based on separation techniques.

The Twister Food Waste Processor

The Twister is a small footprint, low energy use, plastic waste reprocessing unit which has broken into the growing EU and Asia markets in 2022 for depackaging and separation equipment sales.

In recent years, the Twister unit has been developed to meet the organic processing needs of today's food processors. It offers a unique way of processing organic waste and is a highly efficient unit.