- Every year, millions of recyclable materials are inappropriately placed in waste streams.
- British startup Greyparrot uses AI to reduce the environmental damage caused by improper waste disposal.
- This article is part of Build IT, a series about the digital technology and innovation trends disrupting industries.
The oft-cited “reduce, reuse, recycle” approach to waste disposal is easier said than done. Over the past few decades, global conservation efforts have attempted to promote greener attitudes toward recycling, but the effects have been relatively muted. Valuable recyclable materials are still thrown away with the garbage, sent to landfills or incinerated.
Advanced waste management technologies are an underexplored market and could be the key to preventing the loss of valuable materials. Thanks to the startup boom, it is starting to gain more attention.
“If we really want to achieve a circular economy, we need to extract resources from waste streams, and as technology develops, that will become increasingly efficient and effective.” Stephen Cohen said. Director of the Research Program on Sustainability Policy and Management at Columbia University's Earth Institute.
The U.S. recycling rate has increased nearly fivefold over the past 60 years to 32%. The Environmental Protection Agency aims to increase this number to 50% by 2030.
Sort trash using AI and images
British startup Greyparrot, founded in 2019, uses specialized technology to enhance waste management. The company's software, installed at waste management separation facilities, uses artificial intelligence to identify materials left behind in the waste stream.
Greyparrot co-founder Mikela Druckman told Business Insider that the company saw an opportunity to enter waste management after noticing a lack of data collection in the industry. She said only a small portion of the treated waste is being measured and qualitatively tested. “We thought this gave us an opportunity to essentially go digital and build a leading waste intelligence platform,” she added.
The Greyparrot device is designed to sit above the incoming waste stream and use AI-powered imaging to identify recyclable materials such as plastic, aluminum, and paper. These objects are separated from the waste stream and sent to a recycling facility.
The Greyparrot device also catalogs what enters the facility, so waste facility managers can better understand what they are collecting.
Druckmann said waste that enters the facility essentially has a “negative value” until it is sorted and sold to a recycling facility. “The role of a waste manager is basically to turn it into a clean, pure product,” she added.
Greyparrot has 100 devices in 20 countries including the UK, South Korea and the US. The company sells its devices directly to major waste management companies.
The company has decided not to develop robots or other hardware to separate garbage. Druckmann said he wants to adapt the company's AI technology, analyzers and software to existing systems.
Data is transforming how waste management facilities operate
Since 2020, UK waste management company Grundon has been using Greyparrot devices at three of its facilities.
“Colleagues will be looking at ways to improve data collection on facility performance,” said Owen George, Grandon's commercial and resource strategy manager.
Before installing the Greyparrot system, the only way Grandon could estimate the type and number of materials entering the waste stream was by taking small samples from collections throughout the facility and manually examining the materials. did.
Greyparrot devices give Grundon's waste management plant unprecedented data visibility. “It even gives you the value of saying he saw X number of papers worth X amount,” George said. “You can see how the factory is performing from a revenue perspective.”
Grundon's feedback also led to feature updates for the Greyparrot device. At the time of its installation, the device focused on counting materials. “I felt like the waste industry's language of weight was not being understood,” George said. Later on, features including weight data were added.
George says it was initially difficult for factory managers to adjust to Greyparrot's system. The waste management industry relies on manual systems and has limited data collection, requiring vast amounts of new data to be interpreted. However, after learning the system, their reactions changed. “We're at a point now where employees are saying, 'I want to have these units because they're going to make my life so much easier,'” George said.
AI and robotics could be the new future of waste management
Waste management facilities are an important element in mitigating improper waste disposal, but they are less attractive to local communities. “No one wants it installed near where they live,” Cohen said.
Grandon tries to demystify the waste management process by hosting tours of the facility for local residents.
The development of AI also promises a bright future for waste management facilities and their awareness. Druckmann said her goal is to build a “smart material recovery facility” that “adjusts and adapts in real time to a mix of different types of materials and different types of waste compositions.” .
Greyparrot recently signed a strategic partnership agreement with Bollegraaf, one of the largest waste management companies, to build a facility designed to be fully integrated with AI systems.
Cohen said that fully automated waste collection and processing systems, with self-driving cars collecting trash and facilities operating autonomously, could be made possible by AI and robotics.
He said they can also be used at facilities to separate all waste in a single stream, eliminating the need for people to separate their own waste. This is “probably the most promising technology,” he said.
At Grandon, George is already seeing the integration of AI and the expansion of data changing the types of jobs available. “There are fewer people with hammers and more people with laptops,” George said.
Cohen said that for the waste management industry to move forward, it needs to get people outside the facility to rethink their trash. “That's going to be the long-term vision: to try to reconceptualize trash as a resource rather than something that stinks and is ugly,” he said.
