in Barcelona
3 to 5 Nov 2026
Kingston University will lead the National Waste and Recycling Robotics Adoption Hub (NORAH), a £3.6 million project funded by Innovate UK in which £1.5 million goes to the university itself, as one of eight Robotics Adoption Hubs in a £40 million UK government programme. The hub is based in southeast England and is the first in the programme dedicated to waste and recycling, where fewer than 5% of UK facilities have adopted automation.
Funding Structure And Programme Terms
Professor Vasilis Argyriou, a computer vision and AI expert at Kingston University, leads the project. Of the £3.6 million project budget, £1.5 million goes to the university, which leaves £2.1 million for the remainder of the consortium and hub activity.
The programme itself is run as an Innovate UK competition funded by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, which lists up to £38 million of funding, while press coverage of the hub describes a £40 million scheme. Grant requests per project were set between £2 million and £7.5 million, projects start from 1 September 2026 and run for 40 to 43 months to 31 March 2030, and maximum funding rates are 70% for micro and small organisations, 60% for medium organisations and 50% for large ones.
Consortium And Technical Approach
The consortium includes the University of Kent, whose Cognitive Robotics and Autonomous Systems laboratory in the School of Computing contributes humanoid and collaborative robots, computer vision for material recognition and digital-twin simulation. The Kent project is led by Dr Giovanni Masala, with Dr Ioanna Giorgi and Dr Daniel Soria. West London Waste Authority is also a partner, alongside robotics developers, waste operators, local authorities and national bodies.
The hub’s technical methods are advanced sensing, multi-arm robotic sorting cells and digital simulation. Its first priorities are textiles, mixed recyclables and soft-material waste, which Kent says are the streams on which existing systems perform least reliably because they are contaminated, mixed and deformable.
What The Hub Offers Operators
The services confirmed for NORAH are testbeds using contaminated, heterogeneous waste streams, independent benchmarking on operator-specific waste samples, integration support within materials recovery facilities and legacy infrastructure, training and workforce transition programmes, innovation programmes on mixed fibre sorting, contamination removal and automated disassembly, and access to operators, local authorities and commercial facilities for live validation, according to Environment Journal.
Kent says outputs will include measured data on accuracy, throughput, contamination handling and recovery, plus site-specific payback modelling. The benchmarking uses operators’ own samples and generates measured performance data rather than vendor-derived metrics.
“The National Waste and Recycling Robotics Adoption Hub will help UK recyclers move proven robotics from the lab into live operations, keeping valuable materials out of landfill, cutting carbon emissions, creating skilled jobs and accelerating the circular economy,” said Professor Vasilis Argyriou, computer vision and AI expert at Kingston University, in the hub announcement published by Environment Journal.
Robotics Already Operating In UK Facilities
Robotic sorting is already in use at individual UK sites. Veolia deployed a Recycleye robotic arm at its Southwark Integrated Waste Management Facility to sort paper, mixed plastics and beverage cartons, and Northern Ireland’s Bryson Recycling ordered four more robotic sorters from Recycleye Robotics after installing one at its Mallusk facility.
Those installations cover relatively consistent streams such as plastics, paper and cartons. NORAH is aimed at the streams where operators have struggled to predict performance or justify investment, which is the reason the adoption rate is below 5%.
Targets And Timeline
The hub aims to support more than 150 organisations and to deliver operational deployments by 2030, according to Dr Giovanni Masala, Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Kent, who leads the Kent project. The grant terms end the funded project by 31 March 2030, so the 150-organisation target and the deployment target share a deadline with the funding.
The hub’s target of supporting more than 150 organisations will be tested against the fewer than 5% automation rate, and the accuracy, throughput and recovery data it measures on textiles and mixed recyclables will determine whether the site-specific payback models hold at live facilities by the time funding ends in March 2030.
