The worldwide climate change, the consequences of global warming and the increasing prices for secondary raw materials fire the discussion to focus more waste and recycling projects. Since the City of San Jose (CA) initiated their Zero Waste Program to reach the goals that no waste goes to landfill in future. The nationwide discussion begins to set up more and more projects to minimize landfilling and to maximize recycling. Not only enviromental arguments support a higher grade of separation. More and more municipalities and their sorting plants look for new concepts and better technical equipment to separate secondary raw materials. After the economical crisis the demand of used plastics and metals rises in the last few months. The need of the East Asian Region doubles within the next five years. Compared with the United States China, Malaysia and Vietnam consume only a quarter of the plastics per capita a year. This creates future emerging secondary raw markets mainly for homogenous sorted plastic and metals streams. The future will be that different kinds of waste streams from household to industrial sources will be sorted automatically by state of the art technique of sensor based Near Infrared separation. RTT installed since 2002 nearly 300 NIR sorting units worldwide and supplied the first automated sorting plant in China for the Olympic Summer Games 2008. STEINERT becomes in the last years market leader in the US for sorting of ferrous and non ferrous metals. ASCON started 2009 a common project in different sorting plants together with RTT/STEINERT to measure how effective sorting functions. The main issue was the measurement of economic return of invests using state of the art technologies for plastics and metals. The second focus lied on the analysis of productivity and the efficiency to produce homogenous and marketable secondary raw materials for international markets.
