The Customer

Edeka Handelsgesellschaft Hessenring GmbH supplies more than 500 Edeka stores in parts of Hesse, Lower Saxony, Thuringia, and Westphalia from its central warehouse in Melsungen and operates its own beverage logistics division.

The use of folding crates and reusable beverage crates poses a major challenge for the company in terms of quickly sorting items by type and processing deposit refunds.

Technical Specifications

• Sorting Item_1: Various EPS folding crates
• Sorting Material_2: Various Reusable Beverage Crates
• Drop-off locations: 3
• Target lanes: 10
• Sorting capacity: up to 3,600 containers per hour
• Drives: SEW Geared Motors

Design

At the heart of the empty container sorting system is the optical recognition system, which inspects, identifies, and evaluates returnable containers for deposit purposes. The incoming, unsorted empty containers are first assigned to the customer before being manually loaded onto one of the system’s infeed lines. The containers are then automatically distributed to various sorting areas, where they are manually stacked by type onto pallets.

Design Details

Once the containers have been identified, the individual containers are stored separately in a database along with the determined deposit amount and a reference photo for each returning customer. This data is later used to calculate the deposit credit.

Control

• Control system: Siemens S7-315 2DP
• Recognition System: Expert KSA SCL100
• User Interface: WinCC / 10″ touchscreen
• Database: Microsoft Access on a PC with an Ethernet interface