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| The STADLER sorting plant in Sweden. Image: STADLER |
The new Resursutvinning Stockholm MSW sorting plant, designed and built by STADLER Anlagenbau GmbH for Sweden’s largest water and waste utility, is a highly automated, high-throughput facility that supports Stockholm’s environmental strategy, enabling the efficient recovery of recyclable materials and organic waste while reducing CO2 emissions.
STADLER Anlagenbau GmbH,the globally active German company specialised in the planning, production and assembly of turnkey recycling and sorting plants, has successfully completed the new municipal solid waste sorting plant for Stockholm Vatten och Avfall (SVOA). Designed to process 50 tons of waste per hour, the new facility is equipped with fully automated sorting lines that recover organic waste from household garbage, as well as plastic and metals accidentally mixed in the residual material arriving at the plant. This reduces the volume of materials destined for incineration to generate power and heat water, consequently lowering CO2 emissions.
With its fully automated process and two parallel sorting lines that can operate independently, the facility brings resilience and efficiency to Stockholm’s waste management system. Commissioning was completed in August 2024 and the plant was officially inaugurated in October.
“The Resursutvinning Stockholm plant is a leap forward towards ambitious environmental goals while ensuring reliable, high-quality waste management,” says Lars Nyquist project manager at SVOA. “It is important that packaging is sorted at home, but plastic and metal packaging can accidentally end up in the residual waste. With STADLER’s expertise, we now have the technology and infrastructure to improve resource recovery, reduce emissions, and move closer to closing the loop on waste in Stockholm.”
A high-performance facility for smarter waste management
At the heart of the facility is a state-of-the-art sorting process that separates green bags containing organic food waste, as well as any mixed plastics, ferrous and non-ferrous metals finding their way into the residual waste arriving to the plant – with a high degree of precision and automation.
Incoming municipal waste is delivered directly into five walking floors equipped with hydraulic covers, ensuring seamless reception. The material is transferred to dosing conveyors, producing a uniformly distributed stream of waste to feed the plant. After initial manual pre-sorting to remove bulky or hazardous items, the material stream is separated by particle size through STADLER’s screening drums.
A standout feature of the plant is the well-proven Coloured Bag Sorting System, which combines five Near-Infrared (NIR) and visual spectrometers (VIS) to accurately and quickly identify and extract green bags containing food waste without requiring them to be opened. These bags are weighed and routed for biological treatment, preserving the quality of the organic fraction.
The remaining material moves through a series of NIR sorting systems to recover plastics by polymer and colour, and through magnetic and eddy current separators to extract ferrous and non-ferrous metals. An innovative system of movable conveyors beneath the screening drums allows the plant to quickly adapt to changes in waste composition without interrupting operations.
