TIME magazine names Greyparrot’s Analyzer among the innovations set to change the world by unlocking waste intelligence.
Running for over 20 years, the TIME Best Inventions list recognises 300 innovations from across the globe. To compile this year’s list, TIME solicited nominations with a special focus on emerging fields, such as AI.
Inventions were evaluated on several key factors, including originality, efficacy, ambition, and global impact.
Greyparrot’s Analyzer is an AI-powered camera system that captures and analyses waste streams in real time within recycling facilities. It classifies materials across 111 distinct categories and identifies packaging types and brands at an industrial scale.
The Analyzer can track 99% of material moving through a recycling facility. According to the Greyparrot, tasks that would take a person more than 375 hours to complete manually can be processed by the system in around six hours.
The Analyzer doesn’t just see waste, it understands it.
Greyparrot says the technology has already analysed more than 100 billion waste items this year, producing what it calls ‘unprecedented visibility’ across the waste value chain.
The data feeds into the company’s Deepnest platform, which allows packaging producers and brands to assess how recyclable their products are as they move through the global waste system.
The Analyzer is built and manufactured in the UK from recycled materials and features modular, replaceable parts.
Commenting on the announcement, Ambarish Mitra, Co-founder of Greyparrot, called waste one of ‘humanity’s greatest blind spots’.
“The Analyzer doesn’t just see waste, it understands it,” Mitra said. “It turns chaos into clarity, giving us truth in real time about what we throw away, what gets recovered, and what doesn’t.”
“Being recognised by TIME is more than an honour; it’s validation that AI can transform the post-consumption world into a visible, valuable system – one that helps solve our planet’s most urgent challenges.”
Mitra continued that the next big conversation in climate action will be about moving beyond carbon and using waste intelligence to track, recover and reuse products.