Battery waste from households is a mixture of everything: various battery chemistries, lamps, pens, whatever garbage you can imagine. Sorting is needed not only to sort out non-battery waste, but also to separate battery chemistries and shapes or sizes according to those criteria, which meet the delivery specifications of the final recycling company. To achieve a most cost-effective recycling also yielding a high material recovery, the sorting services need to accomplish a precise differentiation of final sorted battery fractions with a high sorting quality up to 99,5%.
Another challenge in sorting are batteries from WEEE treatment plants. These processes generate a mixture of poorly identifiable primary, secondary and partly damaged batteries. Thus, manual sorting is a knowledge based service with a high staff training demand and vital support of a fast working lab. This provides necessary flexibility to achieve a continuous quality at a permanent changing input material every day. It gives an explanation for the fact that only a part of a battery waste stream in a clean state of single cells can be treated by fully automatized sorting machines (image, X-ray, weight and/or induction).