In one other sign of the scramble to speed up the uptake and transformative potential of artificial intelligence, Dutch recycling giant Bollegraaf Group is making a strategic investment in UK AI startup Greyparrot, which uses computer vision for waste analytics.
The veteran manufacturer of MRFs (Material Recovery Facilities) and “turnkey” recycling systems — which was originally founded as a baler machinery maker, all the best way back in 1961 — has been dabbling in AI itself in recent times, opening an innovation test center in its native Netherlands in 2021 and recruiting an in-house AI team to work on integrating AI analytics with its recycling machinery that had led to some business rollouts.
London-based Greyparrot, meanwhile, a 2019-founded computer vision startup (and TC Disrupt battlefield alum), has spent nearly five years developing and applying AI to municipal waste management processes to provide what it bills as “waste intelligence” — aka, data on binned plastics and other tossed items. That is critical for improving the standard of the product for recyclers to sell. The tech will also be used to recuperate beneficial (i.e. recyclable) materials from mixed/contaminated waste streams that may otherwise find yourself in landfill or be incinerated.
The second big puzzle-piece in Greyparrot’s mission to use AI to shrink the world’s waste problem through smarter and more efficient recycling is to maneuver from being a knowledge producer to a decision-maker — because the AI-engine driving sorting and recovering machinery to be more efficient. This too is critical because the world continues to provide more (not less) waste, dialling up the requirement for more intelligently managing the stuff we throw away so our societies don’t drown under a growing mountain of trash.
Add to that, in Europe no less than, the introduction across several recent years of quite a lot of regulatory requirements on packaging and other producers to make use of more recycled materials of their products are increasing incentives — and stabilizing demand — for higher quality recycled outputs to sell them.
While the majority of Greyparrot’s deployments thus far have involved retrofitting its AI devices to existing recycling plants, it expects future waste recovery facilities to be built from scratch with AI embedded from the beginning — and it wants its tech (the Greyparrot Analyzer, as its AI camera hardware unit is named) to be the brain of those operations. So it’s working towards a thesis of rising automation of waste management — where AI-powered data-driven analytics get an increasing number of deeply embedded in how recycling facilities operate in consequence of rising demand to optimize recovery rates, yield higher quality outputs and squeeze how much waste gets, well, wasted.
Greyparrot has been constructing APIs (aka Greyparrot Sync) for integrating with its customers’ sorting and recovery facilities’ machinery for some time. Nevertheless it says the motivation for the brand new partnership with Bollegraaf is to speed up this integration (or digitization) process — because the latter brings a long time of experience in machinery and robotics to Greyparrot’s AI-powered waste recovery party.
“The large vision with Bollegraaf is admittedly accelerating and leading on the digitization of the waste sector,” Greyparrot CEO and co-founder, Mikela Druckman, tells TechCrunch. “Bollegraaf is one among the biggest plant builders on the earth — so constructing the entire infrastructure for waste management, all of the recycling facilities, sorting facilities — and we’re the leading AI waste analytics player at once. So really combining forces is allowing us to go much faster to scale that digitization and, ultimately, go towards a future where we’re constructing the smart MRFs which are fully adaptive, automated, and are really transforming the waste industry by allowing lots more efficiency, lots more recovery and better quality output of those materials.”
AI team transfer as a part of $12.8M strategic investment
The strategic AI partnership the pair are announcing today includes the transfer of Bollegraaf’s own AI vision business to Greyparrot — comprising a team of six people. Greyparrot is acquiring all the pieces related to the vision systems it had developed, per Druckman — “the AI models and likewise the team working on it”. The personnel it’s acquiring will remain within the Netherlands — where the UK startup can even (subsequently) be opening its first office in mainland Europe.
As a part of the deal, Bollegraaf can be making a money investment in Greyparrot — which they’re reporting as having a total value of $12.8M — to acquire a non-controlling, non-majority stake. (NB: The startup last raised a $11M Series A round back in May 2022, following a $2.2M seed two years before that; and says it’s not currently seeking to raise a B round.)
Druckman said they’re not disclosing the mechanics of Bollegraaf’s investment (nor the scale of the stake) but she confirmed there’s a 50:50 split between the money investment portion and the acquisition value being placed on Bollegraaf’s AI business unit that’s transferring over as a part of the deal. (So the going rate for acqui-hiring AI engineers looks to be over $1M an individual.)
Because of this, Greyparrot can be taking up the running of Bollegraaf’s existing AI deployments. But she said it would review these, on a case-by-case basis, to find out whether to transfer the implementation to Greyparrot’s tech (or maintain it as is). While all future AI deployments across Bollegraaf’s plants will after all use Greyparrot’s kit.
The terms of the partnership agreement will see Bollegraaf serving as a worldwide distributor and strategic partner for Greyparrot’s AI camera system hardware — which is currently deployed to extract analytics from waste streams and recycling plants across 14 countries, installed inside some 30-40 facilities. (Europe stays its essential region for purchasers, where the startup says its tech currently reaches about 70% of the market, though it has a foothold within the US market and expects the brand new strategic partnership to assist it speed up its reach over the pond.)
The AI that Bollegraaf had been developing had the identical goal as Greyparrot’s system, in line with Druckman, who described the 2 teams as having built “a variety of complementary” technology. Joining forces will thus enable the startup to step on the gas in advancing its AI. “Leveraging a few of the R&D that they they’ve already done, will help us speed up [development] on our side,” she suggested. “We’re at all times working on developing recent versions [of our Analyzer hardware] and upgrading that. In order that’s really a part of our roadmap.”
“This was very necessary for Bollegraaf,” she added. “That they had been performing some R&D for the previous couple of years. And that by partnering with a player like us, this may also speed up their product development and technology development — and, from our side, the business distribution and scale as well. So it was really a win-win situation.”
Druckman also emphasizes there’s no change of strategy/business model on its part, flowing from the investment. Greyparrrot will proceed to sell its AI-powered waste analytics to other MRF makers, whilst it gets to learn from tapping Bollegraaf’s global scale. (The latter reports some 400+ MRFs and three,100 recycling and sorting systems “designed & installed worldwide” — with a worldwide footprint that laps the globe, stretching from Northern American, through Europe and Asia to Australia.) And, after all, the UK startup won’t be moving into constructing any physical recycling/sorting machinery or robotics; it’ll remain laser focused on AI.
“An enormous a part of the partnership is clearly — one — the business distribution and the dimensions that they’re in a position to provide due to their network they’ve built,” she said, summarizing the drivers for the deal. “So plugging into those retrofits and other recent builds that they’re doing that can be equipped with our Analyzers and AI and digital capabilities.
“The second big thing is the combination of that data with our APIs, Greyparrot Sync, into their control systems, into several types of sorting systems… And again, slowly and surely constructing towards that fully automated, smart MRFs that we’re talking about. But we can be, principally, launching products together — by way of combining our data and the Analyzers, and likewise connecting with their machinery and their systems that they have already got.”
Commenting in an announcement, Edmund Tenfelde, CEO of Bollegraaf Recycling Solutions, added:
With 63 years of industry experience, Bollegraaf continues to be a worldwide leader in fully-automated revolutionary turnkey recycling systems. The long run is obvious: to further increase recycling rates we’d like more insight and collaboration across the worth chain. We’ve been seeking to implement AI that may power fact-based and automatic decision-making to supply our clients with a far more accurate overview of their waste composition and ultimately maximise their ROI. We’re thrilled to make this strategic investment and partner with Greyparrot to bring waste intelligence to each upcoming recycling infrastructure deployments and existing facilities worldwide. We consider that Bollegraaf’s comprehensive knowledge of automation of recycling MRF operations, premium equipment quality, and unique engineering expertise empowered with Greyparrot AI systems represent the one-of-a-kind synergy that’s destined for fulfillment.
Challenges on the road to system change
What are the most important challenges on the subject of improving the efficiency of AI-powered waste processing as things stand? Plastics generally remain tricky, per Druckman, given the range of kinds of plastics that could be present in a waste stream, with different levels of recyclability making it necessary to have the option to tell apart between them as much as possible with a purpose to have the option to recuperate as much of the beneficial (i.e. recyclable) plastics as possible.
“This remains to be where there’s work to be done,” she told us. “Mostly it’s about managing the fluctuations [between different types of plastics] and the hard to recycle plastics. There’s also other areas where Bollegraaf and other of our partners operate in that we’re also going into — so for instance, electronic waste, construction/demolition waste, which have barely different dynamics — however the core principle is similar: It’s a challenge of recognising the fabric and separating the fabric.”
“One thing that I believe is very important to say is that there’s been a variety of focus within the last years on robotic arms specifically, to be a source of separation together with AI. From our standpoint we’ve at all times seen that as one among the numerous options — and that’s why we built the technology and our infrastructure in a way that we’ve APIs that may integrate with robotic arms… but [our APIs] can even integrate with other kinds of separation systems as well. And that’s really necessary because there are a lot of several types of mechanical separation systems… already enabling the separation of fabric that must be digitised and connected with AI,” she added.
“That is the prevailing infrastructure — and we actually consider that we’ve to leverage a variety of the thousands and thousands of investment which have been done — and enhancing that and having the ability to plug into that infrastructure — versus just , you understand, very narrow use cases, with recent hardware.”
Recycling can be, after all, only ever going to be a small piece of a much greater environmental challenge that waste poses. Druckman agrees this demands “system change” and a switch away from ever more extractive consumption to a circular economy where reuse, sustainability and longevity is designed and built it to products from the get-go to tackle the concept of throwaway waste at source. (“Principally reducing plastic use is critical to the answer,” she affirms. “Recovering and recycling — those alone is not going to solve the complete problem. We must be doing those things in parallel.”)
But humanity remains to be very removed from executing that 180-degree turn. So coping with the trash we’re still making, via more and smarter waste management infrastructure looks like a critical stop-gap — to purchase time to tug off the more radical swing in how we make and eat stuff. Hence Greyparrot argues we’re going to want a large increase in waste management infrastructure, and AI-driven efficiency, to cope with the tsunami of rubbish baked in and inexorably coming down the pipe for us over the following few a long time.
Because it stands, the startup estimates just 1% of the waste passing through management facilities is monitored — while, even in “advanced” economies, it says around 40% of waste sorting remains to be done by hand — so the chance to scale an automation-friendly, efficiency-focused approach to waste management looks massive, assuming countries might be convinced of the necessity to clean up their act.
On that front Druckman argues the market is finally reaching a “turning point” — because of some key, change-driving regulations in Europe, including plastic taxes which put minimum requirements on packaging producers to make use of recycled plastics; and EPR (Prolonged Producer Responsibility) rules which force firms to deal with waste issues. She also flags more pro-recycling laws as a consequence of land over the following couple of years.
“That shift is occurring,” she argued. “You’re seeing lots more collaboration across the worth chain and also you’re also seeing lots more commitments towards constructing that infrastructure… There’s still lots to be done but I might say that we’re already seeing the constructing blocks of those policies, the regulation and likewise the business incentives to begin having the ability to [drive the turnaround].”
AI’s ability to provide far more granular data — on what’s being thrown away, how much and where it’s ending up — also creates the chance for what Druckman couches as an extension of “post-consumption responsibility” onto the brands themselves — to have to deal with the afterlife of their products. Whether by selecting more minimal packaging that’s also easier to recycle or by contributing financing to the recycling and recovery of the materials utilized in their products. (Or, ideally, each.)
So, in other words, putting pressure on producers to attenuate waste is one other smart lever that data-driven insights — and AI-enabled transparency onto what’s being thrown away; and never recovered — can pull.
On this front, packaging design is, unsurprisingly, an area of interest for Greyparrot (as, indeed, it’s a burgeoning area of focus for quite a lot of other sustainability-focused startups).
The UK startup suggests its analytics might be utilized by recycling professionals, plant builders, packaging producers, and FMCG brands to tell decisions and help them boost recycling efficiency, comply with recycling regulations, and improve recyclable packaging design. “A part of our vision is to utilise the waste intelligence and insights that we’ve on where the packaging is growing, and clearly our tech’s ability to have the option to recognise the brand itself, to support information and higher recycling of those materials and higher packaging design,” added Druckman.
