1. A market moving faster than usual
Over the past few months, looking at the markets in Europe and the Americas, the cable recycling machinery sector has taken a major leap forward. This isn’t the usual incremental growth the industry is used to: buyer demand has shifted decisively toward higher-throughput systems, which are nonetheless expected to handle processing challenges that are considerably more complex than in the past.
2. Increasingly mixed feedstock, no longer a standard stream
The cable stream reaching a plant today is anything but uniform. Just think of TECK cable, widely used across the U.S. and Canada, with its metal armor and multilayer construction, or of batches heavily contaminated with metals other than copper or aluminum — iron, lead, mixed alloys, in proportions that change from one load to the next. Anyone designing a plant today can no longer plan around a “standard cable.”
3. What plant buyers really want today
Market demand is moving in two directions that must coexist rather than compete. On one hand, automation: reducing direct human intervention on the line and centralizing process control in a single control room. On the other, the ability to precisely separate the metals and materials that contaminate the cables while still maintaining high output quality — never one at the expense of the other. The challenge lies exactly where these two needs meet.
4. Why pre-shredding, granulating, and separating are no longer enough
This trend inevitably requires moving beyond the conventional approach that has shaped the industry for decades: pre-shred, granulate, separate, in a linear sequence designed for relatively predictable material. With increasingly mixed feedstock, that sequence alone can no longer deliver the throughput or the purity required today. What is needed is a more refined level of separation, capable of distinguishing metal fractions that are ever more similar in density and size. Stokkermill is right in the middle of this shift — not watching it from the sidelines.
5. The technologies we’re bringing to Ecomondo 2026
This is where the solutions we will present at Ecomondo 2026 come from: not a single machine, but a set of separation technologies designed to meet these requirements point by point.
- Precision multi-deck density tables that separate metals of different sizes within the same stream more efficiently.
- Precision separators with motorized adjustment of the density table’s working angle, adapting separation in real time to the characteristics of the incoming material, batch by batch.
- Zig-zag air classifiers, dedicated to isolating the dense, heavy metals that conventional technologies struggle to separate.
- High-intensity rare-earth magnets that recover even stainless steel fractions — a material that almost always slips past conventional magnetic separation.
- Optical and X-ray sorting systems that further upgrade the output metals, beyond the limits of density or magnetic separation alone.
6. Leading the evolution, not chasing it
We’re not chasing a trend that others have already caught. It’s the same separation logic we’ve applied for more than 30 years, now taken to a level of precision the market wasn’t asking for just a few years ago. That’s how we see the role of a company that wants to remain a benchmark in cable recycling: not following the industry’s evolution, but helping define it.
7. What you’ll see at our booth
At Ecomondo 2026, these technologies will be shown in action, not just on a spec sheet: precision tables, air classifiers, rare-earth magnets, and optical systems running on real cable streams — mixed, not hand-picked in a lab. We still believe a brand isn’t something you describe — it’s something you see.