Spittal/Drau (Austria), January 2024. Loacker Recycling based in Wonfurt, Germany, is part of the Loacker Recycling GmbH family business headquartered in Götzis, Austria, and specialises in waste cable recycling. Thanks to the recycling concept developed in-house, the company can achieve the highest possible copper recovery at low processing costs. The company trusts in Lindner’s recycling expertise and uses a Polaris 2800 with rotor cooling.
The Loacker Group, based in Götzis, Vorarlberg (Austria), has been dedicated to collecting, sorting and processing valuable materials for over 100 years and is motivated by one thought: The best for the world of tomorrow. Family-owned for five generations, the group consists of a total of 25 companies and operates 47 sites in eight countries. The recycling plant in Wonfurt has been recovering end-of-life cables for decades. These mostly come from the DACH region and are largely collected within the Loacker Group and delivered to Wonfurt for processing. The focus is on extracting pure materials to maximise the recyclables recovery.
Matthias Köhler has been Managing Director at the Wonfurt site since 2012. In recent years, a great deal of energy and expertise has been invested in expanding the recycling plant to achieve the best possible recycling results using the latest technology. In a three-shift operation, up to 100 tonnes of end-of-life cables are transformed into valuable recyclable materials every day. ‘We mainly recover copper from old cables, around 40 to 45 tonnes a day, but also PVC and ferrous metals. While the copper is turned into copper sheets in copper smelters, we deliver the PVC to a company located on site. There, the plastics are turned into barrier products. Ferrous metals are sent for metal processing. The way our plant is equipped, we achieve a particularly high degree of purity. That’s what makes us unique and gives us the ability to return almost 100% of the recycled material back into the cycle,’ explains Matthias Köhler.
