Construction Waste Sorting Robots and Where ABB Fits

Every renovation and demolition leaves a pile of brick, concrete, wood, metal and plastic, and much of it can be reused once someone pulls the pieces apart. For most of its history, construction waste sorting was done by hand, first on bombed streets and later on picking lines inside recycling plants. Since the 2010s, robots with cameras and AI have taken over some of the picking. Our post on demolition robots covers taking buildings down. This one follows the rubble: the women who cleared German cities in 1945, ZenRobotics and AMP, a Copenhagen plant with no hand sorting, and where ABB robots could fit.

A pile of debris beside the partly demolished Millport tower block of the Boothferry Flats in Kingston upon Hull, June 2026. Photo: Hullian111 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How rubble was sorted by hand

After the Second World War, whole cities had to sort rubble. Germany was left with an estimated 500 million cubic metres of it, and in 1945 and 1946 the Allies ordered women between 15 and 50 to help clear it. The Trümmerfrauen used sledgehammers, picks, buckets and hand winches to break ruins down to single bricks, which were passed to the street, cleaned and stacked for rebuilding. Beams, pipes, basins and toilets were kept for reuse. The rest filled bomb craters or went onto debris hills such as Berlin's Teufelsberg, which grew over 22 years from up to 80 truckloads a day.

German women form a chain to clear rubble from bomb-damaged buildings in Berlin, 7 July 1945. Photo: Sgt Hewitt, No 5 Army Film and Photographic Unit via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Peacetime building keeps the piles coming. In the United States, construction and demolition debris grew from 135 million tons in 1990 to 600 million tons in 2018, and about 90 percent of it comes from demolition. Business Insider wrote in 2013 that the European Union generates 900 million tons of it, and that people usually sorted it by hand and were exposed to dust and chemicals while they did. For decades, as the A3 robotics association puts it, recycling plants relied on mechanical separation, optical sorting and workers standing beside moving conveyor belts. NBC News reported in 2018 that recycling workers were more than twice as likely as other workers to be injured on the job.

Workers sort recyclables by hand at the Shady Grove Transfer Station recycling center in Montgomery County, Maryland, 2007. Photo: US Environmental Protection Agency via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The first sorting robots for this stream came from Finland. In 2011 IEEE Spectrum wrote about ZenRobotics, a startup that wanted to put robots built from off-the-shelf parts between the waste and the landfill. By 2013 its ZenRobotics Recycler was sorting metal, wood and stone. By 2018 its biggest machine, the Heavy Picker, could lift 60-pound objects with oversized tongs, and the company had systems at two US sites and in 10 other countries. In 2019 Denver's AMP Robotics and Japan's Ryohshin launched two robot systems for construction and demolition waste: AI-Benkei, which handles debris up to 40 kg, and AI-Musashi, a two-robot cell that picks 160 pieces a minute.

Wood, insulation and metal in separate piles at the demolition of the former POHTO institute buildings in Oulu, Finland, May 2025. Photo: Mikko J. Putkonen / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Robot sorting plants for construction and demolition waste

In Copenhagen, RGS Nordic now sorts without anyone picking by hand. The company handles up to a third of Denmark's construction waste and runs four ZenRobotics 4.1 Heavy Pickers on a line reported in operation in June 2025. A trommel screen takes up to 45 tons an hour, a ballistic screen splits the flow into 2D, 3D and fine material, and magnets pull out iron. Then the robots pick up to 10 fractions in one pass, handling pieces from 80 mm to 1.2 m and up to 40 kg. "Mixed waste is largely unusable, but sorted materials can be returned to producers," said COO Rasmus Brødsgaard Buch. Terex bought ZenRobotics in 2022.

Piles of rubble at a recycling centre, 2021. Photo: Neil Owen / Geograph via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

On 30 September 2026 AMP closed $70 million in project financing for a new municipal waste sorting plant in Portsmouth, Virginia, and said it has deployed more than 400 AI systems across North America, Asia and Europe. On 9 October Kingston University said it will lead NORAH, a £3.6 million national hub that will test multi-arm sorting cells on live, contaminated UK waste streams. According to the announcement, fewer than five percent of UK waste facilities have adopted automation, partly because some robots struggle with waste that is contaminated, mixed and deformable.

A train of gondola cars carrying construction and demolition debris in Worcester, Massachusetts, April 2026. Photo: Quintin Soloviev / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

We found no ABB robot in a construction waste sorting plant. ABB arms do sort other waste. At the TEIA recycling plant in the Bollate prison near Milan, Hiro Robotics uses ABB IRB 2600 and IRB 460 robots to separate and sort parts from old electronics, including heavy or potentially hazardous pieces, while inmates train to dismantle and sort the rest. Hiro's flat-screen line has three robot stations and can handle up to 90 monitors an hour. ABB's venture arm has also invested in the US start-up Molg, whose robotic microfactories take apart servers and other equipment from data centers.

An ABB robot with a screwdriving tool in Hiro Robotics' system for taking apart old electronics. Photo: ABB

Where construction waste sorting robots go next

I expect homeowners to notice the change only at the far end: a plant that can split the skip from a kitchen renovation into clean fractions sends more of it back to producers. Factories may cut the waste before it exists. ABB has said that up to a quarter of the material delivered to a building site leaves as waste, and its robots helped Intelligent City, which builds timber housing modules in Vancouver, cut its waste by 30 percent. Danu Robotics wants to make its sorting robot small and sturdy enough to work outside waste plants.

Two ABB robots taking apart server hardware in a Molg microfactory. Photo: ABB

For ABB, construction waste sorting is still a possibility. Its Robotic Item Picker already uses AI vision to find grasp points on items it has never seen and picks up to 1,400 an hour, but its payload is 3 kg, far below the 40 kg pieces that C&D robots lift. For heavy debris, ABB's IRB 6730S and IRB 6750S shelf robots carry up to 350 kg and are aimed at industries that include construction. A cell with a heavy arm for big pieces and a fast one for light fractions is something engineers could lay out and test in RobotStudio before it touches a single brick.

ABB's Robotic Item Picker moves an item between bins, guided by its own camera. Photo: ABB

Messy material, cost and people are the open problems. NORAH will test robots on live waste streams because dirty, mixed and deformable waste is where some systems struggle. Robots also have to pay for themselves. Danu's founder Amy Ma estimates that a robot on a sorting line earns a site $485,000 in extra revenue, more than double its cost, though that is the company's own figure. NORAH also aims to create skilled jobs, and the people who still pick by hand face the injury risks NBC described.

Workers in a USAID-funded program crush rubble in Carrefour, Haiti, in February 2011 so it can be reused as fill. Photo: Kendra Helmer, USAID via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

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