Queen's University Belfast and Kiverco Limited KTP 24_25 R3

A recycling plant will get a digital twin—a virtual replica that mirrors its real-world operations in real time. This matters because recycling plants must meet rising customer demands for both high-purity recovered materials and sustainable, energy-efficient operations. Currently, plant design and manufacturing processes rely on static engineering models that cannot adapt quickly to changing feedstock or purity requirements. The digital twin will simulate every stage of the sorting and recovery process, allowing engineers to test design changes, optimise material flows, and predict performance before altering the physical plant. If this succeeds, the company can build recycling plants that recover more usable material with less energy and waste. For the public, this means more effective recycling infrastructure—cleaner streams of plastic, metal, and paper that can actually be remanufactured, rather than sent to landfill. For the manufacturer, it means faster design cycles, lower production costs, and a competitive edge in supplying sustainable plant equipment. The project is applied industrial research with a direct commercial outcome: a working digital twin integrated into the company’s engineering and manufacturing workflow.