Pre-treatment

Our recycling process is divided up into different stages during which the sorting gets increasingly detailed. When a lorry full of waste reaches a facility (carefully selected on the basis of price, geographical position and technical expertise), it starts off in the hands of our pre-treatment team.

Metals can be endlessly recycled.

Our pre-treatment facilities

We use the services of some 30 pre-treatment facilities. Some recycling fractions can be treated more or less anywhere in Sweden, whereas others require more specialised treatment only found in certain places. Below is a list of the different fractions, and which pre-treatment facilities El-Kretsen hires to take care of them:

Small appliances

White goods

Fridges & freezers

Light sources

Batteries

Fire alarms

Every cage we collect from the recycling centres has its own individual ID number, and when the cage reaches the pre-treatment facility, the waste is weighed and registered. After, any hazardous materials are removed from the rest of the waste. Damaged and dangerous products must not be reused, as this would expose a new user to risks. The pre-treatment process is a necessary step in preparing the waste materials for transformation into new raw materials.

This is where the real recycling takes place: where the materials go from being waste to becoming new raw materials by being taken apart, sorted and shredded. Batteries and other components that are hazardous to the environment are manually removed by the recyclers before they sort the waste according to material category.

Recovering metals saves up to 95 per cent of the energy used to mine the virgin materials – and the great thing with metals is that they can be used and reused any number of times.