Head of Business Development at Greyparrot, Matthew Steventon explains how a innovative AI analytics tool is changing the waste management sector.
For decades, the waste sector has struggled against a lack of visibility. Despite the wealth of data on the resources we buy and sell, our ability to account for their post-consumption life has lagged behind. Keeping track of waste flows remained a largely manual process, relying on the intuition and experience of facility operators, rather than concrete data.
At Greyparrot, we’ve been on a mission to change that – not by replacing operators or staff on the facility floor, but by combining their skills and experience with granular insight into the materials they process. Six years later, and we’ve learned that unlocking the full value of waste streams isn’t about wholesale automation.
Instead, facilities have made measurable progress on recovery rates and revenue when operators can translate real-time waste data into practical tools and concrete action. True impact is about making that data as accessible and actionable as possible.
Facility staff have been operating at a disadvantage
With waste streams largely invisible at scale, facility operators were left to make decisions based on incomplete reporting, offsetting the data gap with experience and intuition.
Constrained by labour shortages and rising costs, the average facility operator could only gather data on around 1% of their material. With that tiny window into material composition, many were tasked with making business-altering decisions about sorting processes, investments, and bale purity.
By capturing real-time data directly from sorting lines, AI waste analytics fills that visibility gap. Global recovery facilities are using systems like Greyparrot Analyzer to accurately identify the material type, size, brand and even food-grade status of every waste object they process. Intuitive, role-specific dashboards and analysis reduce the barriers between insight and action.
Operators haven’t downsized their teams by automating waste analysis. Instead of dedicating valuable staff to time-intensive sampling that results in a fraction of insight, they’re retaining the same teams and deploying them to high-value sorting and maintenance tasks.
AI success relies on expertise and action
We measure our technology’s impact in facility outcomes, and the results have been striking. Facilities using the Analyzer system often see a 10 to 20% increase in the volume of material they recover.
With easy access to real-time data and historical composition trends, staff can target resources that previously passed through facilities unnoticed, and prioritise the operational improvements with the biggest upside.
Process engineers, like KSI Recycling’s Tjerk Wiersma, use their experience to test hypotheses, then use our AI to gather meaningful feedback. Last year, Wiersma suspected that more frequent machinery maintenance would be worth pausing operations for. Analyzer data proved him right, and his facility has since increased recovery by 10%.
He told us that Analyzer insight actually made staff more essential, explaining that they ‘use AI to help make the people we already work with even better, not just to automate processes. AI-powered robots can’t clean equipment’.
We’ve seen similar stories unfold around the world. GreenTech Baltic recently achieved a 10% boost to plastic recovery revenue after its production team started using data to guide the product blending process. At Murphy Road Recycling’s All-American MRF, operators are using AI insight to lower disposal fees.
In each case, the success story hasn’t relied on pure automation. We have consistently learned that the biggest performance leaps happen when operators embrace AI waste analytics, learn from its insights, and use their experience to act in response.
Data-driven efficiency protects existing teams
Precise, data-driven action has evolved from an innovation to an essential survival tool in recent years. Facilities weathering the combined challenges of rising operational costs, low-cost plastic imports and fluctuating commodity prices have relied on AI’s efficiency gains to steady themselves in an unstable economic environment.
Jody Sherratt, Operations Director at Cheshire West Recycling, has used Analyzer to monitor quality and protect margins. In his words, ‘it’s helped us stop prices coming down, which other businesses have struggled to do’. In the process, they’ve protected both profits and payrolls.
Upskilling staff and attracting a new generation of waste leaders
Like many industries, the waste sector is being reshaped by AI. However, unlike other industries, the impact isn’t reducing headcounts. AI is upskilling existing teams and attracting new talent to a sector that has been contending with a persistent skills gap.
Seasoned facility staff have done more than adapt to waste intelligence systems; in many cases, they’ve eagerly embraced the opportunity to work with new technology and now see AI as an essential recovery tool.
When Analyzer units went offline during a network upgrade at Re-Gen’s recovery facility, plant managers told CIO Conor McCooey that they ‘wanted them back on’ as soon as possible.
Elsewhere, AI waste analytics is creating entirely new roles. Omrin’s Karin Wolters has taken on an in-house data specialist, who ‘will be completely dedicated to extracting insights from the Analyzer system, and helping my colleagues implement them’.
As I’ve already mentioned, that last point is critical – the insights are only impactful once they’re acted on, and leaders like Karin have recognised that.
I expect to see similar roles emerge across the waste sector this year, as more organisations learn to navigate the massive amount of data they’ve gained access to. Those roles are drawing a new generation into the waste sector, which has long struggled to attract young talent.
At this year’s RWM conference, Foppe-Jan de Meer predicted its impact on KSI Recycling and the wider industry: “With AI, we can attract younger people who are really eager to work with us because we have this technology. In that way, the benefits aren’t even about the data, but bringing motivated and talented people into this industry.”
Those people are entering an industry enriched by data, with the opportunity to define entirely new career paths in a vital legacy sector.
As Greyparrot continues to grow in 2026, our commitment remains the same: to empower waste professionals with the data they need to recover more resources. AI hasn’t replaced human skill, judgement and action, but made it more vital and impactful than ever.
