Advanced separation, identification and sorting technologies

The long-term goal is to turn Europe into a recycling society, avoiding waste and using waste that cannot be avoided as a resource whenever possible. The aim is to reach much higher levels of recycling and minimise the extraction of additional natural resources. Effective recycling depends on effective and efficient sorting. Separating the different elements found in waste streams is crucial in order to recover valuable materials, minimise the amount of material sent to landfill and provide a new destination for recyclable materials.

Therefore, GAIKER’s research focuses on the development and use of technologies to separate valuable fractions from industrial and post-consumer waste streams (light packaging, ELV, WEEE, CDW, etc.). Waste sampling, characterisation and conditioning are combined with advanced separation operations, such as mechanical recycling based on differences in waste materials (density, shape, size and electromagnetics, etc.) and automatic identification and sorting, using on-line analysis techniques (infrared, LIBS, Raman, hyperspectral imaging and artificial vision) where chemometric tools and algorithms are used to develop predictive models based on data analysis in order to recognise and separate materials.