Sorting the Future: 20 Years of Technology in Service of Recycling

Twenty years ago, the idea of a sorting machine that could identify and separate materials by composition at industrial speed was, for most of the recycling industry, still a novelty. PICVISA's own story begins even earlier than that – not in recycling at all, but in a garage in Igualada, where the company's earliest work focused on quality control systems for the ceramics industry.

That early work in ceramics quality control turned out to be more relevant to recycling than it might have seemed at the time. The fundamental challenge – using sensors and vision systems to inspect and classify materials automatically – was the same problem that, applied to waste streams instead of ceramic tiles, became the foundation of optical sorting for recycling.

Over the following two decades, that foundation grew into a full range of sorting technologies addressing some of recycling's most persistent challenges: separating glass by colour and removing contaminants to produce furnace-ready cullet, identifying plastics by polymer type for recycling into new packaging, and more recently, extending into textiles and metals as those material streams have demanded the same kind of precision sorting that glass and plastics recycling have long relied on.

What hasn't changed over twenty years is the underlying principle: that recycling outcomes are determined, to a large degree, by how accurately materials can be identified and separated. What has changed is the sophistication of the technology available to do that – from early sensor-based systems to today's combination of multi-sensor detection, robotics, and increasingly, artificial intelligence.

Looking back over twenty years also means looking at how the recycling industry itself has changed – from a sector focused primarily on diverting waste from landfill, to one increasingly viewed as a source of raw materials in its own right. PICVISA's technology has evolved alongside that shift, and the next twenty years look set to bring further changes – in the materials that need sorting, the technology available to sort them, and the role recycling plays in a genuinely circular economy.

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