Greyparrot launches recyclable material data platform for brands

The company’s AI-powered offering, Deepnest, is designed to provide packaging producers with tailored insights into how to improve their products and measure their real-world impact.

A computer screen displaying a program.

Image courtesy of Greyparrot

Waste analytics company Greyparrot has launched Deepnest, an artificial intelligence- (AI-) powered waste intelligence platform designed to give brands direct access to their recyclable material data.

London-based Greyparrot says what happens to products, such as packaging, when they become scrap is a knowledge gap for most industries due to limitations in waste and recycling infrastructure and a lack of available data and says Deepnest fills this knowledge gap, “unlocking postuse packaging performance insights to help brands shape their products and business models.”

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Greyparrot claims recyclable materials offer a “powerful opportunity” for both business growth and environmental gains, but brands aren’t fully able to tap into this potential. The company cites a Pew report claiming that, by 2040, regulations like virgin plastic taxes and extended producer responsibility (EPR) fees could cost global businesses up to $100 billion per year, and keeping materials in the value chain for a longer period of time is key to improving circularity and reducing financial risk.

“Consumer goods brands currently spend millions annually on product innovation, testing centers and consultants to improve their packaging, but lack the real-world data to validate these developments,” Greyparrot says.

Deepnest, according to the company, delivers detailed, product-level data to brands, tracking packaging performance by brand, material, product type and region. The platform also shows exactly how packaging moves through a waste and recycling system: what’s sorted, recycled or lost.

Powered by Greyparrot Analyzer AI camera systems in material recovery facilities (MRFs), Deepnest relies on what the company calls the world’s most comprehensive household packaging waste database, with the Analyzers processing more than 40 billion objects annually at MRFs across more than 20 countries. Greyparrot says it currently detects $1 billion worth of recyclable materials in the streams it monitors and estimates that, if rolled out globally, its systems could uncover up to $100 billion in recyclable value every year by 2040.

Using this data, Greyparrot says Deepnest provides brands with actionable insights, generating tailored recommendations to improve packaging, from shape and color to material composition, allowing those brands to measure the real-world impact of their product innovations. Brands can use Deepnest to:

  • benchmark packaging recycling performance against competitors and category standards;
  • test and compare packaging formats within sub-brands before scaling across the full portfolio;
  • identify specific design elements that reduce recyclability in priority markets; and
  • quantify the impact of research and development (R&D) efforts, packaging innovations and circularity interventions

Greyparrot says its “ultimate ambition” is that Deepnest not only will reduce financial risk, but help brands keep much higher volumes of their recyclable materials in their own value chain.

“The term ‘waste’ is itself a misnomer,” Greyparrot co-founder Ambarish Mitra says. “Our data shows that postconsumption materials are worth billions to our global economy. For too long, brands have had to operate with little visibility into their packaging’s end of life. Empowering brands with real-world data on their products’ recyclability gives them a huge competitive advantage, which is exactly what Deepnest is designed to do. As regulations tighten and consumer demands grow, winners will be those who act on real-time insight—and can prove it.”

Unilever and Amcor are some of the consumer goods brands and packaging producers trialing the technology.

“AI-enabled waste intelligence tools have great potential to provide new visibility into how packaging is actually being sorted and processed in real-world recycling systems,” says Dr. Liz Smith, global R&D head of Deodorants at Lond-based Unilever. “Our goal is to reduce our virgin plastic use and make our plastic packaging reusable, recyclable or compostable, and insights like these could critically help to inform future packaging design, enable recyclability in practice and at scale and increase the supply of high-quality recycled materials.”

Mark Roberts, circular economy director at Switzerland-based Amcor, notes that the packaging industry relies on lab-scale testing and software models to predict recyclability of packaging solutions, but actual real-life data is missing, given the resources required to get material data at scale from operating facilities. “With Greyparrot’s AI-powered waste intelligence, Deepnest is unlocking real-world recyclability data that the packaging data chain has been missing.”

Australia-based Asahi Beverages is another company trialing Deepnest. The company recently has increased its use of sustainable packaging, including switching to 100 percent-recycled plastic bottles for brands such as Pepsi Max, Solo, Schweppes and Sunkist. The company also operates Australia’s largest polyethylene terephthalate (PET) recycling facility—a joint venture with The Coca-Cola Co. and Europacific Partners, and Asahi Chief Supply Chain Officer Sandra Gibbs says the company has been looking for real-time data to help maximize its impact.

“That’s why we installed Greyparrot Analyzers to unlock operational data to improve recycling quality and output,” Gibbs says. “Deepnest can transform that data into insights to guide smarter packaging design from the outset. We’re exploring how this technology can help us embed a data-driven approach across the entire packaging life cycle, moving us closer to 100 percent circular packaging.”

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