Separation of wires from recycling streams is often desired for material recovery, quality improvement or for operational reasons. It increases the recovery of non-ferrous metals while congestion of material flows can be avoided. Tests with a new type of separator give good results for removing wires and other long particles from a granular stream of material. High recovery is achieved by repeating a simple separation step many times within one unit process. The resulting cascade system was tested with 700 kg of bottom ash, showing good agreement with theory and resulting in a complete recovery of wires exceeding 50 min in length. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.