Greyparrot and VAN DYK Bring AI to MRFs Across the U.S.

The clock is ticking as the U.S. reaches for the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) recycling goal of 50 percent by 2030. That rate sat at 32 percent when last tracked in 2018.

Materials recovery facilities (MRFs) working to hit the 2030 target are hustling to bring in more material otherwise bound for landfill or incineration—and they’re working to figure out how to crank out higher-quality products.

A key strategy has been to concentrate on improving sorting processes. Operators are realizing they need data to achieve this—only with good data can they determine the quality of input and make adjustments when that quality is not up to par.

In answer, Greyparrot, a developer of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered waste analytics, and VAN DYK Recycling Solutions, builders of recycling and waste sorting systems, have teamed to help U.S. MRFs optimize their processes. Their plan is to install AI technology in existing and new facilities to continuously monitor feed, digitize, and automate the sorting of recyclables.

Greyparrot’s AI systems operate in recycling plants across 20-plus countries, characterizing waste objects into over 89 categories in real time to deliver data on material type, mass, financial value, and brand. The technology provides visibility into sorting yield, loss rate, and product purity, among metrics.

Gaspard Duthilleul, chief operating officer of Greyparrot, talks about the value added for the customer base he and VAN DYK are targeting:

“If you are a recycler you want to know that the material coming into your MRF is of a good quality so you can put it on the market with confidence.  You can have an idea of the quality by looking at it, but you are limited without data.  By doing the full analysis of waste and monitoring it 24/7 we can give a fuller picture of the stream.”

The AI piece helps managers optimize operations from the point where waste enters the plant, through to the end of the process, enabling the ability to adjust equipment at each location to better control input and output.

“If you have a lot of plastic coming into the plant or paper, or a blend of both, you can adapt every machine downstream. So, we are creating this feedback loop to determine efficiency and to continually adapt. And that’s where the value is,” Duthilleul says.

VAN DYK, who serves over 340 North American MRFs and has set up 2,400 installations to date, will be the distributor and provide the physical recycling infrastructure.

“Our customers want to know what materials they are not recovering and what they are losing that is affecting their bottom line. Value varies from commodity to commodity, and they want to calculate specifically where they are losing the most. Employing analyzers on quality control and residue lines will yield a ton of revealing data on plant sorting performance,” says Ryan Cournoyer, process engineer, Van Dyk Recycling Solutions.

Some of the facilities that the partners aim to retrofit are 10 to 15 years old or so and have seen substantial changes to waste streams since their launch—much less newspaper, substantially more cardboard, and alterations in packaging design, among transformations. The technology is light, small, and easy to install, making retrofit practical for these older operations looking to modernize their existing infrastructure to take on whatever streams come their way, Duthilleul says.

With new builds, the Greyparrot Analyzer and the physical equipment will be fully integrated, enabling automation of the entire system, with adjustments made automatically based on the data. Though with retrofits humans will adjust the equipment based on dashboard intel from the Analyzer.

Companies with multiple locations can export data from each sorting center and integrate it into one database. The platform can provide a general overview of operations; a comparison of sites’ performances; and inform decisions, maybe to move a stream from one facility to another nearby operation that is better equipped to manage it.

Sometimes robots work as add-ons to boost sorting capacity.

They are good at recovering heavy items, for example industrial wastes or large bags filled with trash. And they help maximize purity by precisely targeting specific contaminants.  

It’s the real-time data that Cournoyer sees as key to improving recovery.

“An operator can watch on a tablet what the system is sorting at that moment, and if they see a deviation from the plant’s typical performance, they can correct it then and there. These on-the-fly adjustments could not have been anticipated before this kind of technology.”

Duthilleul says customers typically save hundreds of thousands to up to two million dollars a year, which he attributes primarily to greater efficiency.

On the environmental side, he credits the system for helping customers avoid 20 metric tons of carbon equivalent emissions in 2023, a result of higher diversion from landfill and incineration.

The U.S.-based agreement between Greyparrot and VAN DYK follows a recent announcement:  Greyparrot and Bollegraaf, the world’s largest MRF builder, plan to roll out AI into plants around the globe. With about a dozen projects now under contract the ambition is to install thousands more systems over time.

Duthilleul sees VAN DYK’s and Bollegraaf’s strong market presence, and the three companies’ combined expertise as a way to lay more tracks.

“We want to embed ourselves in the current ecosystem of the sorting and recycling infrastructure. Through these partnerships, we anticipate driving higher recycling rates and more efficiencies for waste managers.”