Collection, selection and recycling: the full cycle

With climate emergency firmly on the political and public agenda, recycling has taken on an urgency it didn't have a generation ago – but understanding how recycling actually works means looking at it as a cycle with three connected stages.

The recycling cycle

Collection brings waste from households and businesses to a central point. Selection – sorting – separates that mixed waste into distinct material streams. Recycling processes those separated streams into materials that can be used in new production. Each stage depends on the one before it: good collection with poor sorting still produces low-quality output, and good sorting can't compensate for collection that mixes incompatible materials beyond recovery.

Recycling types

Different materials – glass, plastic, paper, metal, textiles – have their own recycling processes, each with different tolerances for contamination and different requirements for how clean the separated stream needs to be before it can be processed.

PICVISA, active in the transformation of waste management

PICVISA's technology sits at the selection stage of this cycle – the point where mixed waste becomes usable streams. Improving this stage has a multiplying effect on the cycle as a whole, since better selection means more of what's collected actually makes it into recycling.

Did you know...?

A surprising amount of recyclable material is lost not because it can't be recycled, but because it never gets correctly separated from the rest of the waste stream – which is exactly the gap that optical sorting and robotics are designed to close.

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