Waste Sorting Projects in the Baltics: Azortum’s Experience Across Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania

Waste sorting projects in the Baltics are becoming more complex. Operators are expected to recover more material, improve fraction purity, reduce landfill dependency and keep energy use under control, often within existing buildings, tight installation windows and changing regulatory pressure.

This is where waste sorting becomes more than an equipment supply task. A successful project starts with the operator's business reality, where material streams, capacity needs and long-term recovery goals all affect how the sorting line is designed

What does designing and developing a new sorting line look like when there are not only different engineering problems to be solved, but also business objectives to be reached? Here to give a glimpse into these projects in the Baltics is Azortum's work with Eco Baltia and CleanR Verso in Latvia, Ragn-Sells Estonia in Tallinn, and Ecoservice in Lithuania.

Across Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, waste management companies are under pressure to recover more value from mixed and pre-sorted streams. Municipal solid waste, packaging waste, paper, plastics and construction waste each behave differently on a line.

Therefore, a modern waste sorting project may include many or even all of these prerequisites:

• increase throughput without sacrificing quality;
• recover cleaner recyclable fractions;
• reduce residue rates;
• manage energy use;
• work within existing buildings or constrained sites;
• keep installation disruption as low as possible;
• adapt to future material volumes and regulation.

This is why the following examples from four sorting lines weren't treated as standard packages, as each project was designed around the input material, facility, and commercial target.

Eco Baltia, Latvia's leading waste and environmental management company, needed a system that could process both municipal solid waste and packaging waste efficiently.

Azortum designed, installed, and commissioned an integrated sorting line with capacity for 30 tonnes per hour of MSW and 7 tonnes per hour of packaging waste. Depending on input availability, the system is designed for annual volumes of up to 45,000-100,000 tonnes.

A key design choice was avoiding intensive shredding. Instead, the line uses adaptive modular equipment, screening, optical sorting and efficient material routing. This helps reduce unnecessary energy use while preserving material quality.

On top of achieving recovery efficiency and lower energy use goals, the new sorting line also had a positive sustainability and circular economy impact. It reduced reliance on landfills through higher material recovery rates and increased recyclable material purity, improving resale value and downstream processing while also aligning with EU climate and recycling directives.

Construction and demolition waste creates a different kind of challenge. It is heavy, abrasive, and irregular, which means the line must be built for durability as much as sorting accuracy.

For CleanR Verso, Azortum engineered a 25 tonnes per hour C&D waste sorting line with a design target of 50,000 tonnes annually. The line separates valuable materials such as wood, plastics, cardboard, stones, metals, and RDF.

The system was installed in Latvian winter conditions and without a building cover, which made planning and equipment durability especially important.

One of the most important engineering decisions was a shredder-less design. By avoiding shredding where it was not needed, the line reduces electricity use, limits fine dust creation, and helps preserve material quality.

The project also includes an intelligent absorber for vibrating screens, reducing structural strain and supporting smoother long-term operation.

The Ragn-Sells Estonia project adds another important aspect to the Baltic perspective: how to improve an existing sorting line without disrupting daily operations.

At its mixed paper and packaging sorting plant in Tallinn, Ragn-Sells wanted to increase paper sorting throughput and add plastic packaging sorting into the same line. According to Azortum’s published case study, the upgraded line increased capacity from 3 tonnes per hour to 6 tonnes per hour while reducing residue rates.

In addition to reaching a higher capacity, the upgrade also changed the role of manual work. Before, people had to perform more of the positive sorting manually. The improved line introduced more machinery to handle the heavy lifting, allowing workers to move toward quality control.

Two challenges shaped the project:

• fitting new equipment into an existing building;
• installing the upgraded line while sorting operations continued.

Here, a phased installation approach was used, so Ragn-Sells could keep operating during the work. The project also required creative layout decisions, including placing a glass separation solution outside the building when it could not fit inside.

The Ragn-Sells story is especially relevant to many other facilities in the Baltics, because many recycling plants do not have the luxury of starting from scratch. Often, the best project is a smart retrofit that increases capacity, improves purity and protects uptime.

Ecoservice's project in Lithuania also reflects many of the same realities faced by Latvian and Estonian operators, like urgent timelines, packaging waste growth, limited space, and the need for higher automation.

After a fire destroyed Ecoservice's packaging waste sorting facility in Vilnius, the company needed to rebuild quickly while improving performance. Azortum delivered a compact, high-capacity packaging waste sorting line in less than 12 months.

The line processes up to 12 tonnes of household packaging waste per hour and separates material into 10 distinct fractions. It integrates drum screening, optical sorting, eddy current separation, magnetic separation, fire detection, fire suppression and SCADA control.

It's a good example of how great planning, where engineering and installation are tightly coordinated, can result in speedy development, safety, automation and material recovery.

The material streams are different, so none of them could be solved with a standard layout.

Each one required tailored engineering, brand-independent technology selection, efficient use of available space, installation planning around real operational constraints, and a clear focus on recovery quality, residue reduction, and future material volumes.

That is why planning a new waste sorting project should start with the operating model before the equipment list. Before investing in a new line or retrofit, operators should clarify:

• What business problem must the project solve: higher recovery, more capacity, better quality, lower operating cost?
• What material streams create the biggest value opportunity today?
• Which create the biggest operational bottleneck?
• What throughput is needed to meet current volumes and future growth?
• Which recovered fractions have the strongest resale, compliance, or downstream processing value?
• What output quality do partners, regulators, or internal processes require?
• What level of downtime can the business tolerate during installation or retrofit work?
• How can the existing facility footprint be used most efficiently before considering building changes?
• What safety and maintenance requirements are needed?
• What operational data should managers and operators see to track performance?

Answering these questions early helps ensure the final line is designed around the business case, the facility and the material stream, not just around individual machines.

With more than 30 years of experience delivering turnkey waste sorting and bulk material handling solutions across the Baltics and wider Europe, Azortum combines business-first engineering with practical installation expertise.

The four projects described above show our ability to work across different material streams, facility types and project constraints. The right sorting line is not the most standard one, but the one designed around your material, your facility, your people and your business targets.