Abstract: The invention relates to a process for dividing up and recovering the individual materials from old cables. For this purpose, the cable mixture is sorted into individual constituents and cut to size, the outer plastic sheath is removed by being slit open, and the individual cores are fed to a disk comminuter. It is essential, at the same time, that the disk comminuter should cut up the individual plastic-sheathed cables or the cable composed of several individual cables into short cable pieces of a length of 3 to 10 mm in a salami-like manner. Because the pieces are very short, the short cable pins are separated from the plastic ring arranged round them on a following vibrating screen.