How Greenback uses waste intelligence to certify product quality


  • Greenback uses Greyparrot Analyzer's AI to evaluate incoming plastic waste, consequently boosting both the quality and market worth of their recycled polymer oil.
  • By embedding waste intelligence into their operations, Greenback can tailor the feedstock blend to meet different customer requirements.
  • Integrating the Analyzer’s data with their eco2Veritas platform allows Greenback to create smart contracts that ensure waste pickers are paid fairly.
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Meet Greenback

Greenback Recycling Technologies tackles the global plastic waste crisis through advanced collection and recycling solutions that offer brand owners and the plastics value chain fully traceable recyclate. In 2023, Greenback built a first-of-its-kind recycling plant that turns hard-to-recycle plastics circular and tracks the origins of the material.

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The challenge

At Greenback's pioneering flexible film recycling plant in Cuautla, Mexico, the innovative Enval pyrolysis units convert flexible films into recycled polymer oil.

Built in partnership with Nestlé, the facility leverages Greenback’s proprietary ‘eco2Veritas’ - an innovative Circularity Platform designed to track product quality and eliminate human error and fraud by monitoring the physical process in real-time. This blockchain-based evidence system offers complete traceability throughout the circular value chain.

But Anthony Meadows, Greenback's Chief Digital Officer, saw an opportunity to go even further.

To increase accountability, maximise confidence in quality certifications and command higher prices for Greenback’s products, Meadows began exploring the potential of AI waste analytics to gather and compare material data from multiple sources.

The solution 

With its ability to directly integrate with third-party machinery and software, Greyparrot presented the perfect solution to embed waste intelligence into Greenback’s operations.

Here’s how it works:

  1. A pre-sorting Analyzer Unit tracks infeed material composition, then sends real-time data to the eco2Veritas dashboard via a Sync integration.
  2. Greenback uses Analyzer data to increase product quality by adjusting feedstock blends and tracking sorting efficiency.
  3. The eco2Veritas system automatically collates data from across the facility, generating a Certificate that details all the materials that go into each batch of oil, and the purity of the finished product.

Our team collaborated with Meadows to embed Analyzer in both the flexible film recycling process and the eco2Veritas certification system.

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“We took the decision to make it a system with zero human input. eco2Veritas automatically gathers evidence from multiple places and corroborates it, so we needed to be able to link everything together in one place.

Greyparrot data is embedded directly into our dashboard. Composition is a foundational part of quality control, but we also use Analyzer to corroborate weights from our other data sources.”

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Anthony Meadows

Chief Digital Officer at Greenback

The results

A flexible waste intelligence platform made it possible to build the reliable, industry-first quality certification scheme Meadows envisioned. Now, Greenback can corroborate evidence across the chain:

"The information we get from Greyparrot's AI is of high value. The composition data is front and center. Technologies inform one another in the pursuit of accuracy."

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Today, waste intelligence is a fundamental part of Greenback’s recovery effort, allowing them to gather evidence with minimal disruption.

Together, our technology works seamlessly to ensure the purity of recycled polymer oil, improving product quality and enabling Nestlé to confidently recover and repurpose polymers for a substantial environmental impact.

But data has the power to drive change beyond the facility, and Greenback shares our belief that resource recovery is as much a social effort as an environmental one.

Meadows and his team are now extending eco2Veritas’ capabilities to use AI to both increase flexible plastic recovery, and ensure waste pickers get paid what they deserve.

"By integrating Analyzer's composition data with blockchain technology, we can create smart contracts that ensure pickers are automatically and objectively paid more for their high-quality material."

 

Why Greenback chose to partner with Greyparrot:

  • Sync's integration with Analyzer, which can identify nearly 70 types of waste, made Greyparrot the top choice.
  • Greyparrot Analyzer's AI presented an opportunity to fill the composition data gap at scale.
  • Greyparrot integrates directly with Greenback’s eco2Veritas platform, ensuring accurate quality certification for the recycled oil.
  • Greenback knew Analyzer's AI would prove faster and more accurate than humans in recognising contaminants.

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Get the data you need for high-quality resource recovery

If, like Greenback, you’re excited about maximising product quality with digitisation, we’ll supply the AI and data to help you do it.

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