Created in 2012, the industrial startup Cyclamen has specialized in processing metallic waste found in household incinerator ash. Experiencing strong growth, it has completed an extension of its factory in Moselle and is focusing on recovering ultra-pure aluminium for high-value-added applications.
Multiple sorting steps are required to recover the melted aluminium that remains in household incinerator furnaces.
In the best of worlds, aluminium would always be carefully collected for recycling. Everyone would sort their waste perfectly, and in every factory, production scraps would be separated for reuse, for example in closed loops. Reality is less rosy. Losses are numerous, and only a few hikers keep their can with them to throw it in the right bin. According to Citeo, the eco-organization in charge of household waste, only 37% of aluminium packaging is properly recycled in France. While major aluminium manufacturers and beverage can producers have been pushing for years for a deposit on cans to improve this poor score, the Montpellier-based startup Cyclamen tackles the problem from the bottom. It proposes to recover aluminium from the ash produced by household incinerators and other poorly sorted waste.
Not Losing Metals in the Slag
“There are lots of little bits of aluminium in the gray bins. Slag—the technical name for solid incinerator residues—can contain 1 to 2% non-ferrous metals. So we looked for a solution to not lose them permanently,” recalls Arnaud Chaulet, co-founder and CEO of the small company. Created at the end of 2012, it initially aimed to recycle rare earths before pivoting to trading and then processing metallic waste two years later.
Removing the metals they contain—mainly aluminium, but also stainless steel and copper, along with some precious metals—is all the more beneficial as it allows better reuse of the remaining solid residues. “It’s a win-win: we sell the metals we extract, and the slag can be better marketed because over time, aluminium oxidizes and expands when in contact with water, preventing the use of untreated slag as a road sub-base, for example,” explains the entrepreneur.
Cyclamen, which funds its R&D with its own resources, now has three mobile installations, transported in containers to incinerators whose ash Cyclamen processes. “We use a classic non-ferrous metal extraction technology: eddy currents. It’s fairly simple, but the operation involves many subtleties depending on the granulometry, extraction, or moisture of the slag,” details Arnaud Chaulet, who notes that “the deposit is very significant,” especially in France and Germany.
Sorting Grains One by One
Cyclamen installed a factory in Éguelshardt, Moselle, in 2019. The fast-growing company finished building an extension this summer and is receiving its last machines. The extension, costing over 7 million euros, will increase the plant’s processing capacity by 40,000 tons, yielding around 20,000 tons of recovered metal. In 2024, the site processed 18,000 tons of non-ferrous metals. Five jobs will be created, bringing Cyclamen’s workforce to 60.
“Our factory mainly processes mixtures of non-ferrous metals from incineration, which we recover with our mobile units or buy from major waste treatment groups, to sort them and produce different grades of aluminium, copper alloys or stainless steel, and a few other by-products,” summarizes Arnaud Chaulet.
The goal is to maximize value by selling each output stream at the best price. But slag, which looks like a pile of grayish fragments of varying sizes (from grains barely larger than sand to pieces over 10 cm), is not easy to process.
Rapid Growth
“It’s complicated material: when you throw a yogurt lid in the bin, the aluminium burns in the incinerator and forms a small ball that can pick up impurities during cooling, like a bit of glass,” describes Arnaud Chaulet, summarizing his proprietary process. It involves a decompaction step, followed by granulometric sorting and dry separation methods, such as using air currents to distinguish copper-containing alloys from lighter aluminium.
In 2024, Cyclamen launched a two-year R&D project supported by 800,000 euros from Ademe. The goal? Test X-ray-based technologies (XRF, XRT, Libs) to identify and separate different alloys. “It’s about seeing inside the materials to sort finely and allow aluminium to be reused for high-value applications,” explains the Cyclamen leader confidently. For example, distinguishing aluminium from a can from that used in furniture. “What changes the game for us isn’t artificial intelligence, but increased computing power: it enables real-time X-ray image processing to direct each aluminium piece to the right place with an air jet,” he continues, without detailing targeted performance or tech partners. A way for the gem to sustain its explosive growth. In 2024, Cyclamen achieved 23 million euros in revenue, up from just under 19 million the previous year and only 3.4 million in 2020.
