AI : Greyparrot marks breakthrough in recycling and industry collaboration
New hardware and AI updates boost sorting precision
This year's Plastics Recycling Show Europe (PRSE) saw the company unveil its new AnalyzerWave hardware. This combines NIR’s polymer recognition with Greyparrot AI’s ability to track the material, volume, mass, function and brand of waste objects, enabling the identification of plastic waste in incredible detail.
Alongside the launch of AnalyzerWave, Greyparrot announced a significant enhancement to the plastic recognition capabilities of its AI. The update introduces the ability to track plastics by their opacity and colour — two variables that significantly impact their value — and improves the system’s food-grade recognition.
According to the company, this “gives sorting facilities a competitive edge in a market that is looking for recycled material of a quality that can compete with virgin plastics”.
Cross-sector gatherings
Industry leaders gathered alongside PRSE to discuss the practical applications of AI's rapidly evolving recognition capabilities.
During the course of the conference, KSI Recycling played host to EU leaders in the field of recycling at their Netherlands headquarters, with a view to demonstrating how facility-wide waste intelligence is facilitating a closed-loop recovery system. The visit demonstrated how real-time data from Greyparrot’s Analyzer system is achieving higher recovery rates and greater operational efficiency.
In the UK, Greyparrot brought together policy experts and waste professionals for a collaboration day focused on automated compliance sampling. The session explored how AI can support more accurate and scalable sampling methods in line with evolving Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) regulations, thereby improving transparency and efficiency across the sector.
Testing AI plastic recognition at scale
A landmark report on the recycling of food-grade polypropylene (PP) provided an opportunity to test the accuracy of AI's plastic recognition capabilities on a large scale.
The What’s in a Bale report by Closed Loop Partners revealed that an impressive 85% of PP waste was high-value clear or white polypropylene, with close to 90% of this material meeting food-grade requirements.
The study used Greyparrot AI’s new plastic recognition capabilities to analyse over 45 million PP objects in just three months — a task which, according to the companies, would have taken staff four years to complete. A sub-study compared AI recognition with manual analysis of 30,000 objects and concluded that automated analysis could accurately identify food-grade polypropylene on a large scale.
Advocating for a unified plastic value chain the impact of plastic recycling
In order to raise awareness of the growing impact of these developments and advocate for a value-chain-wide approach to plastic recycling, Greyparrot COO Gaspard Duthilleul appeared on France's Smart Impact television programme.
“We can’t just improve one point in the value chain to solve a global waste crisis. We create a huge amount of analytics that drive operational optimisation, but … this information will also help brands understand what happens to their packaging in sorting facilities, make improvements to packaging design, and start having conversations with the waste sector based on real-world data.”