
Of the 8.3 billion tons of virgin plastic waste created each year, despite decades of efforts to reduce the amount that ends up in landfills, only about 9 percent gets recycled.
London-based computer vision startup Recycleye looks to give those recycling numbers a big boost with its AI-driven system for identifying waste materials.
By automating and speeding the movement of materials through sorting systems, and identifying them with more precision, Recycleye says it can significantly increase capacity for recycling companies while upping the overall recovery rate.
Pretty lofty promises from a two-year-old company that started in the most unglamorous of ways.
We went out and collected trash from bins, took it back to my garage, and started building our first proof-of-concept, said Peter Hedley, chief technology officer at Recycleye, which is a member of the NVIDIA Inception accelerator program for AI startups.
One Man's Trash Is Another Man's Treasure Hedley and Dewulf, co-founders of Recycleye. Hedley and company co-founder and CEO Victor Dewulf started discussing the possibilities of their technology during their masters' work at the Imperial College of London, where they worked on applying computer vision to waste streams.
Dewulf ultimately wrote a paper on the topic, got interest from academia and industry, and then left his job as an analyst at Goldman Sachs to start working on a Ph.D. so he could refine his idea. The next thing Hedley knew, Dewulf had him dumpster diving and developing the idea into a commercial product.
Buoyed by acceptance into Microsoft's AI accelerator program, they found themselves on the receiving end of an £800,000 (about $1.1 million) seed investment, followed by another £400,000 in grants in 2020.
By the end of 2020, the startup had already proven itself with the top waste-management firms in the U.K. Last April, they partnered with energy leader TotalEnergies and recycling pioneer Valorplast on the OMNI project, one of seven winning projects selected by nonprofit French sustainability company Citeo.
An AI on Closing the Recycling Loop To date, effectively recognizing and separating items that have contained food from other items has not been possible. However, a crucial step in improving recycling rates is to optimize the quality of recycled materials that are passed on to plastic manufacturers.
Recycleye's partnership with Valorplast and TotalEnergies focuses on the application of AI to identify food-grade and nonfood-grade plastic packaging with the goal of increasing the circular recycling of these products. It could even help in the development of new applications, such as improved food packaging.
Recycleye has also partnered with universities to create WasteNet, an open-source database that is now the world's largest waste dataset, with more than 2.5 million training images.
Recycleye is an NVIDIA Metropolis partner, providing offerings that integrate the full Metropolis stack for video analytics inference. The Recycleye team uses the NVIDIA Jetson platform and dug into accelerated deep learning tools such as pretrained models, the NVIDIA TAO Toolkit and the NVIDIA DeepStream SDK.
With the NVIDIA tools and huge training dataset behind it, Recycleye has slashed the time it takes to deploy its model from an unworkable two months down to just two hours, while achieving accuracies exceeding human vision in identifying items.
The company's devices run on the network's edge, doing all computations onsite, provided there's sufficient internet connectivity. Models are trained in the cloud, on a GPU-enabled instance of Microsoft Azure, and then deployed to Recycleye's devices at client sites.
Algorithms are automatically updated on client devices during software updates. The cloud system also processes data logs and provides the client with dashboard summaries of that data.
A Recycleye intelligent picking system. Coming: Global Expansion and More Robots Recycleye also develops robots powered by Recycleye Vision, jointly with FANUC, one of the world's largest robotics manufacturers. Having already installed Recycleye Vision and Recycleye Robotics in the U.K. and France earlier this year, Hedley expects more waste companies will follow suit to automate their manual sorting with robotics.
But Recycleye has much bigger aspirations now that it has a scalable system that can be deployed globally, and Hedley said that the more deployments the company does, the better its technology will get.
When we have a device at both the end and the front of a line, we can see what happens if the quantity of material increases, but the quality decreases, said Hedley. We can start optimizing machinery and configuration, and start having machines making decisions.
North America Stories
15/05/2026
Lightware returns to InfoComm 2026 with a focused showcase of scalable USB-C connectivity, next-generation AV-over-IP solutions, and technologies that help over...
15/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
15/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
15/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
15/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
15/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
15/05/2026
Delivering a live, arena-scale production of a massively popular band is no small feat. Between expansive in-arena LED walls and a global live stream fed to onl...
15/05/2026
Connection is the heartbeat of any strong community, and with live streaming becoming more accessible in the modern era, it's much easier for faith-based or...
15/05/2026
Powered by GX 3 media servers, optimised IP-VFC workflows and on-site engineering expertise, the production delivers high-performance visuals for one of the wor...
14/05/2026
Sweetwater and Airstream have announced a custom-built Dolby Atmos mobile recording studio inside an Airstream trailer, set to tour music festivals, schools, tr...
14/05/2026
The American Association of Professional Baseball (AAPB) has announced a new par...
14/05/2026
ESPN has announced plans to transform Santa Monica Beach into a broadcast hub du...
14/05/2026
Amagi has announced a significant update to Amagi CLOUDPORT, its cloud-based broadcast playout platform. The update includes 250-plus features shipped in FY25-2...
14/05/2026
Clear-Com will exhibit at InfoComm 2026 (Booth N7005, June 17-19, Las Vegas Convention Center), introducing a new product that builds on Arcadia Central Station...
14/05/2026
Ikegami will exhibit at BroadcastAsia 2026 (Stand 5D3-1, Singapore Expo, May 20-22), introducing two new viewfinders alongside its existing camera, control, and...
14/05/2026
Grass Valley has announced that dB Broadcast has delivered new IP-based outside ...
14/05/2026
NAGRAVISION, a Kudelski Group company, has announced a partnership with the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association (WPBSA) to launch Play Snooker,...
14/05/2026
Belden Inc. has announced a definitive agreement to acquire RUCKUS Networks from Vistance Networks for approximately $1.85 billion. The transaction has been app...
14/05/2026
NVIDIA has released the Content Localization Blueprint, a modular reference arch...
14/05/2026
Disney has announced that Disney will be the exclusive U.S. streaming home of the Banana Bowl, the Banana Ball league season championship, streaming live this ...
14/05/2026
Arkona technologies and technology partner manifold will demonstrate their production solutions on the Magna Systems and Engineering stand (Booth 5D1-1) at Broa...
14/05/2026
Haivision will host a webinar on Thursday, May 21 at 10 a.m. ET / 4 p.m. CET cov...
14/05/2026
The CW Network and ESPN have announced a sublicense broadcast agreement for The CW to televise ACC football and men's and women's college basketball gam...
14/05/2026
The agreement marks Scripps Sports' first NBA local rights deal...
14/05/2026
A new report from education-technology company Wiingy testing post-ChatGPT predictions against three years of real-world data has identified broadcasting as one...
14/05/2026
Global Citizen and FIFA have announced that Madonna, Shakira, and BTS will headl...
14/05/2026
LOS ANGELES, CA, May 14, 2026 - The nonprofit Sundance Institute announced today the cohort selected for the 2026 Episodic Lab program, taking place at Dunaway ...
14/05/2026
Soldiers equipped with Falcon IV radios will soon gain a sense-and-protect capa...
14/05/2026
Artists concept of the L3Harris Next Gen RTG in flight configuration, designed to provide 250 watts of reliable power for decades-long missions in deep space....
14/05/2026
Car ad spend rises sharply in March as more auto buyers turn to electric, hybrid...
14/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
14/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
14/05/2026
CueScript's CueiT 4.0 Wins Future's Best of Show Award, Presented at 2026 NAB Show by TV Tech
CueScript, a leading international developer of professio...
14/05/2026
Expert-Led Education Sessions and Development of Online Training Program Accelerate IPMX Adoption and Deployment
The Alliance for IP Media Solutions (AIMS) to...
14/05/2026
Klvr is launching in the United States with a professional-grade rechargeable battery solution that cuts costs and improves performance across live entertainmen...
14/05/2026
Shooting into the depths of Bedlam with URSA Cine 17K 65
Brie Clayton May 14, 2026
0 Comments
Indie feature film paired digital 65mm capture with a Bl...
14/05/2026
WeMakeColor expands with Baselight, becoming hybrid color facility
Caroline Shawley May 14, 2026
0 Comments
Boutique Mexican-based studio integrates B...
14/05/2026
Berklee's Summer in the City Returns with Free Concerts Throughout Boston Ar...
14/05/2026
Chelsey Green Named to Billboard's 2026 Women in Music List The Berklee professor and chair of the Recording Academy Board of Trustees joins other high-pr...
14/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
14/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
14/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
14/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
14/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
14/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
14/05/2026
Six decades of products built around the people who use them...
14/05/2026
Designed to embrace multiple production processes and deliver high-end live broadcast workflows, Vivid Broadcast has combined Calrec True Control 2.0 enabled co...
14/05/2026
Today, Jigsaw24, the UK's leading media equipment supplier and systems integrator, announces a new partnership with EVS, a global leader in live video techn...
14/05/2026
Berklee Convenes Leaders in AI, Music for Inaugural AIMS Symposium The three-day event puts musicians at the center of the future of music creation, ethics, a...
14/05/2026
Back to All News
The Last Laugh: NIAJ Fest Wraps Another Successful Los Angeles Takeover
Entertainment
14 May 2026
GlobalUnited States
Link copied to clipb...