Recycleye’s latest QualiBot installation in the Iberia region is now delivering advanced robotic waste sorting at SFS in Valencia — sorting high-volume waste streams, removing workers from one of the most hazardous jobs in the plant, and freeing them for work where their skills count for more.
The customer: how robotic waste sorting helps SFS Valencia
SFS Facility 3 UTE — the joint venture between S.A. Agricultores de la Vega de Valencia (SAV) and Fomento de Construcciones y Contratas (FCC) — operates the urban solid waste treatment plant in Manises, Valencia, treating 350,000 tonnes of municipal waste per year.
Incoming waste runs through a pre-treatment warehouse with three lines, each with a nominal capacity of 30 tonnes per hour. Every line takes the stream through bulky screening, glass recovery and double screening to pull out the organic fraction for composting, then ballistic separation and optical sorting. The optical equipment splits out brick packaging and the PET and HDPE plastic fractions for baling — while the mixed plastic fraction and line rejects are sent to the plant’s manual sorting areas.
The challenge: making recycling’s toughest line safer with robotic waste sorting
Those manual sorting areas are where the hardest work in the plant happens. Even with heavy automation upstream, the mixed plastic fraction and line rejects still end up in front of people: pickers standing full shifts over a fast-moving belt, in heat, dust and noise, pulling recoverable materials and contaminants out of an unsorted municipal stream by hand.
The work is not just exhausting — it is dangerous. The stream carries material that people should never have to touch: hypodermic needles and other sharps, broken glass, batteries at risk of ignition, chemical and medical containers, and biological waste. Every pick is a potential exposure. Recruiting for the role is difficult, retention is worse, and no amount of PPE changes what is coming down the belt.
SFS didn’t want to make a dangerous job slightly safer. They wanted people off that line altogether.
The solution: QualiBot on the quality line
Recycleye installed 2 QualiBot units directly onto the existing SFS quality-control line — a retrofit completed without stopping production. Powered by Recycleye’s AI vision system, QualiBot identifies every item on the belt in real time and performs the picks that human hands used to make, shift after shift, without fatigue and without exposure.
The team members who previously worked the line have been redeployed across the facility — into machine oversight, quality supervision, maintenance and logistics — roles where their experience of the material stream is an asset rather than a hazard. This was never a headcount exercise: it is about allocating people where they can be better used.
The results: last month on the line
Every one of these picks used to be a human hand reaching into the stream.
| Material stream | Picks completed last month |
| PET bottles | +1,000,000 |
| HDPE bottles | +100,000 |
| PP/PS | +375,000 |
| Total | +1,475,000 |
That’s nearly 1.5 million picks in a single month — performed without fatigue, and without a single person exposed to the hazards on the belt.
For Recycleye, the installation is a statement of principle as much as a milestone: no one should have to put their hands into a stream of hazardous waste to make recycling work. It’s what the Iberian market can expect from every deployment that follows — people off the dangerous line, and more material recovered.
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