The global waste landscape presents a significant challenge and opportunity for businesses. While recyclable materials hold immense potential for both economic growth and environmental benefit, brands often lack crucial insights into the post-consumer journey of their products. This knowledge gap, largely due to limitations in waste infrastructure and data availability, impedes efforts to achieve true circularity and mitigate financial risks associated with evolving regulations. Addressing this, Greyparrot, a leader in waste analytics, has introduced Deepnest – a groundbreaking AI waste intelligence platform designed to empower brands with direct access to their recyclable waste data.
Current industry practices often see brands investing heavily in product innovation and testing without sufficient real-world data to validate their packaging developments. This is particularly critical as regulations, such as virgin plastic taxes and Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) fees, are projected to cost global businesses up to $100 billion annually by 2040. With a staggering 95% of plastic packaging discarded after a single use, enhancing material circularity is paramount for both environmental stewardship and financial resilience. Deepnest directly addresses this by delivering detailed, product-level data, offering unprecedented visibility into how packaging performs within the waste system.
Deepnest transforms raw waste data into actionable commercial insights. By tracking packaging performance across various metrics—including brand, material, product type, and region—the platform reveals the precise journey of packaging through the waste system, indicating what is sorted, recycled, or lost. This objective, data-led approach eliminates assumptions and guesswork, providing a clear picture of real-world recyclability.
The platform is powered by Greyparrot Analyzer AI-camera systems deployed in material recovery facilities. These systems form the backbone of the world's most comprehensive household packaging waste database, processing an astounding 40 billion waste objects annually across more than 20 countries. Greyparrot currently identifies over $1 billion worth of recyclable materials within the waste streams it monitors, with estimations suggesting that a global rollout of its systems could uncover up to $100 billion in recyclable value each year by 2040.
Beyond mere data collection, Deepnest provides brands with tailored recommendations to improve packaging. These insights cover various aspects, from shape and color to material composition, enabling brands to quantify the real-world impact of their product innovations. With Deepnest, brands can:
Greyparrot’s overarching goal for Deepnest is to not only mitigate financial risks for brands but also to significantly increase the volume of recyclable waste retained within their own value chains. This fosters substantial financial value while simultaneously driving greater transparency and accelerating the transition towards a truly circular economy.
Ambarish Mitra, Co-founder of Greyparrot, emphasized the intrinsic value of post-consumption materials, stating: "The term 'waste' is itself a misnomer – our data shows that post-consumption materials are worth billions to our global economy. For too long, brands have had to operate with little visibility into their packaging's end-of-life. Empowering brands with real-world data on their products' recyclability gives them a huge competitive advantage, which is exactly what Deepnest is designed to do. As regulations tighten and consumer demands grow, winners will be those who act on real-time insight — and can prove it."
Unilever and Amcor are among the prominent consumer goods brands and packaging producers actively trialing Greyparrot's technology to navigate the evolving landscape of waste materials and leverage its business-critical insights.
Dr Liz Smith, Global R&D Head of Deodorants at Unilever, commented on the potential of such tools: "AI-enabled waste intelligence tools have great potential to provide new visibility into how packaging is actually being sorted and processed in real-world recycling systems. Our goal is to reduce our virgin plastic use and make our plastic packaging reusable, recyclable or compostable - and insights like these could critically help to inform future packaging design, enable recyclability in practice and at scale, and increase the supply of high-quality recycled materials."
Sandra Gibbs, Chief Supply Chain Officer at Asahi Beverages, highlighted their existing efforts and the role Deepnest could play: "Asahi Beverages has made big strides in sustainable packaging, including switching to 100% recycled plastic bottles for brands like Pepsi Max, Solo, Schweppes, and Sunkist. We also operate Australia's largest PET recycling facility—a joint venture with Coca-Cola Europacific Partners—and we've been looking for real-time data to help maximize its impact. That's why we installed Greyparrot Analyzers to unlock operational data to improve recycling quality and output. Deepnest can transform that data into insights to guide smarter packaging design from the outset. We're exploring how this technology can help us embed a data-driven approach across the entire packaging lifecycle, moving us closer to 100% circular packaging."
Mark Roberts, Circular Economy Director at Amcor, underscored the missing piece of real-world data: "The packaging industry relies on lab-scale testing and software models to predict recyclability of packaging solutions, but actual real-life data is missing, given the huge resources it would take to get real waste data at scale from operating facilities. With Greyparrot's AI-powered waste intelligence, Deepnest is unlocking real-world recyclability data that the packaging data chain has been missing."
The launch of Deepnest marks a significant step forward in bringing transparency and data-driven decision-making to the realm of waste management. By providing brands with the insights they need to understand and improve the circularity of their products, Greyparrot is poised to help unlock substantial economic and environmental value from post-consumer materials.
Greyparrot is using AI to revolutionize the resource value chain by gathering previously unavailable data on waste streams. Its systems collect real-time data on global waste streams, detecting over 40 billion waste objects in 2024 alone. In the process, the company has created one of the world's most comprehensive waste datasets. That data equips recyclers, brands, and regulators with actionable intelligence to improve efficiency, accountability, and sustainability in the global resource ecosystem.
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