Greyparrot Analyzer is helping one of the UK’s leading plastic recyclers automate their sampling process — and laying the groundwork for reduced downtime, purer products and higher revenue.
Why IPL Brightgreen turned to waste intelligence
The team at IPL Brightgreen is driving a sustainable, circular future by improving the quality and usability of recycled plastic by returning a steady stream of high-quality plastic waste back to the circular economy. To do it, they sort mixed plastic waste into a pure stream of PP, HDPE and PET plastic for washing, reprocessing and reuse.
Product purity is tied directly to revenue, so it’s essential to monitor the composition of the material they receive and output. As a major British reprocessor and packaging recovery note (PRN) provider, they also need to sample even more waste than the minimums outlined in the UK’s materials facility sampling requirements.
For Head of Compliance Mira Kromp, sampling is a vital — but resource-intensive — process:
As the business has grown, we have a lot more material coming in — and we still have to keep up with compliance sampling and supply quality monitoring. At the moment, that’s a very manual, time-intensive process.”
- Mira Kromp, Head of Compliance at IPL Brightgreen
Until now, that mammoth data collection effort has been a time- and cost-intensive manual process that covered a tiny proportion of material.
To automate the process without skyrocketing hardware costs, Kromp and Head of Technical and Quality Jonathan Attwood investigated AI waste analytics:
“An AI robotics solution wasn’t a cost-effective way to meet our sampling needs. Instead, we chose Greyparrot’s standalone system and its ability to identify a broader range of plastics.”
- Jonathan Attwood, Head of Technical and Quality at IPL Brightgreen
Automating the sampling process with Greyparrot Analyzer
By deploying the Greyparrot Analyzer system on their facility’s infeed lines, the IPL Brightgreen team will automate their input monitoring process overnight — freeing their sampling specialists to track output quality in more detail than ever.
Greyparrot Analyzer isn’t just eliminating a costly sampling process, though. Automated monitoring is exponentially increasing the information IPL Brightgreen can gather:
We get a much bigger, more meaningful sample size: now, we can scan 99.9% of the material we receive, as opposed to 60kg of material for an entire load.
We’re also gathering data about item count, mass and more, which you obviously can’t achieve with manual sampling.”
- Jonathan Attwood, Head of Technical and Quality at IPL Brightgreen
That extra detail is already surfacing opportunities to improve efficiency beyond sampling automation. Facility downtime is an early target for optimisation:
Materials like the paper labels on some plastic objects can cause blockages in our wash plants.
Real-time information enables us to monitor things like paper, which means we can prepare as soon as it arrives in our facility rather than taking a reactive approach to downtime”
- Jonathan Attwood, Head of Technical and Quality at IPL Brightgreen
Monitoring infeed waste unlocks the ability to proactively minimise downtime. But for IPL Brightgreen, deploying Greyparrot Analyzer on output lines may prove just as valuable in the long-term:
Maximising revenue in a fully-automated future
Avoiding downtime is just one of the added benefits that IPL Brightgreen anticipate from real-time material composition data. Quality certification is another revenue-critical task that the team believe they can optimise with AI:
“The price we charge our customers depends completely on purity, so if we can use data from AI to prove that our natural PET bales are of high purity, for example, that’s a win-win: our customers are confident in a pure product, and we can price it appropriately.”
- Mira Kromp, Head of Compliance at IPL Brightgreen
For Attwood, automating critical processes like these are steps on the journey towards a fully-automated future:
“Ultimately, I’d love to have AI automation on all of our inputs and outputs to remove human error from the data collection process entirely. We’d love to have real-time data across the entire facility.”
- Jonathan Attwood, Head of Technical and Quality at IPL Brightgreen
We’re thrilled that Kromp, Attwood and the IPL Brightgreen team are inspired by the possibilities of real-time material data and waste intelligence.
Together, we’ll turn waste data into actionable steps towards a circular future for plastic.
