Returnable PET bottles are regaining strength as environmentally friendly packaging for the beverage industry. Repeated use of lightweight products reduces plastic waste while also lowering carbon emissions. To meet the ever-increasing demands on quality and food safety, bottles must be effectively inspected for contamination using so-called “sniffer systems” before refilling.

UNISPECTRE 400 represents a new generation of sniffer technology. A new high-resolution spectrometer, which captures optoelectronic absorption spectra from each returnable bottle and evaluates them with AI-based algorithms, is the heart of the system. It was specially developed and optimized for use in the inspection of PET bottles to detect even the smallest traces of foreign substances and comply with increasingly stringent limit values for contamination. Contaminants that so far had been impossible to detect are now also reliably identified thanks to the system’s outstanding sensitivity. Contaminated bottles are safely sorted out, with a very low false rejection rate.