Due to increasing energy requirements for buildings, thermal insulation composite systems (TICS) have been used to insulate building facades since the 1970s. In view of the longevity of these composite materials, there has been an increased amount of TICS waste in recent years. Since there is no current recycling concept for these systems, an enormous resource efficiency potential remains unused. Due to the complexity of composite materials this study focuses on the pretreatment and discusses different processing steps in detail.