Every two years the recycling industry puts everything it has under one roof in Munich. We went to IFAT 2026 to see where the technology is heading, to compare notes with the people building it, and to check one specific thing: whether anyone out there is now doing what we do better than we do it. Here is what we came back with.
AI has arrived on the sorting line
The clearest shift this year was artificial intelligence moving from the conference talks onto the working machines. Sorting systems from the likes of TOMRA and STEINERT are now reading material with a precision that was not on the table a few years ago, telling LDPE from LLDPE from PP, and flagging multilayer films that used to slip through. For anyone working with film waste, that matters. Cleaner separation at the front of the process is the single biggest lever on the quality of everything that follows.
Washing and extrusion are starting to talk to each other
The second trend was integration. EREMA and Lindner both showed setups where the wash line and the extruder no longer run as two separate worlds but as one process, with automated control passing data between the stages and holding the output steady.
It is a direction we strongly believe in and are already working towards where possible: making the entire process more connected and efficient rather than optimising each machine in isolation. That is why it was particularly encouraging to see EREMA and Lindner working towards a more integrated system, where the washing and recycling stages can communicate, share data and make better use of energy across the process. It is a promising direction, and one we would be excited to take further as we continue to invest in our plant.
Water treatment is getting smaller and smarter
Plenty of floor space went to modular, mobile units for cleaning process water. The thinking is practical: instead of one large fixed installation, you bring treatment capacity to where it is needed and scale it up or down as the operation changes. For an industry under growing scrutiny on its water footprint, that flexibility is going to count.
Chemical recycling keeps pushing at the hard cases
There was visible momentum behind chemical recycling for the plastics that mechanical processes struggle with. It is not a replacement for what we do, and the economics still have a long way to go, but it is steadily carving out a role at the difficult end of the waste stream that mechanical recycling was never built to handle.
Quality is finally beating capacity in the conversation
Maybe the most telling shift was in how people talked. For years the headline number at a show like this was throughput, how many tonnes per hour a line could push. This year the conversation had moved to quality of regranulate. That is exactly the bet we made when we chose our line, and walking the halls in Munich it felt less like a gamble and more like the direction the whole industry has turned toward. Lindner summed up the mood on their stand better than we could: "Ready for the future of your business."
What it confirmed for us
We will be honest about why we went. When you have just made a major investment, part of you wants to walk a show like IFAT and find out you missed something, because that is how you learn. We did not. We came home with confirmation that the technology we run is at the front of the field for washing and recycling waste LDPE film. There is always room to improve, and we will keep looking for ways to make our process better, investing where it brings real value to the material and to our customers.
What did move us was seeing how far AI can still take the process from here. The machines are getting better at the one job that decides everything downstream, knowing exactly what material they are looking at. That is a future worth being ready for, and it is one we intend to be part of.
If you want to see what our line produces, you do not need a brochure or a sales call. Request a sample and run it on your own machines.