How Much Sorting Is Enough: Identifying Economic and Scrap-Reuse Benefits of Sorting Technologies

One strategy for mitigating the effects of rapidly growing global materials consumption is intensified recycling. A key barrier to recycling is the ability to segment or sort constituents within end-of-life products. Various sorting technologies hold promise, but each must demonstrate added value to achieve wide-scale deployment. Potential factors affecting such value include the mix of scrap supply, the nature and mix of finished goods demand, sorting technology performance, and costs. This article examines the use of optimization models to identify economically efficient sorting strategies and their impact on scrap usage. Using this method, this article attempts to identify the conditions that amplify and mute the value of sorting to facilitate recycling. When this method is applied to a case representative of European aluminum secondary production, it is clear that sorting methods can add value in a broad range of conditions. Although better sorting performance (in the form of segmentation efficiency, referred to as recovery rate) correlates positively with cost savings and scrap utilization, it does not always vary monotonically with optimal sorter utilization (i.e., the fraction of scrap sorted rather than unsorted). Furthermore, the case analysis indicates that the value of sorting is more strongly dependent on recovery rate for the more heterogeneous fraction, which, in the case of aluminum, is the cast-like fraction. Ultimately, sorting increases production flexibility, making a recycler more economically resilient in the face of changing supply and production conditions.