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
05/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
05/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
05/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
05/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
05/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
05/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
05/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
05/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
05/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
05/06/2026
Frequency, the engine powering many of the world's leading streaming television channels, today announced the launch of In-Scene Advertising, a new monetiza...
05/06/2026
Berklee Study Reveals Video Has Become Essential to Music Careers Survey findings show social platforms have become the primary source of music for video cont...
04/06/2026
Sony Electronics is introducing the SRG-AS10, a 4K 60p-compatible PTZ auto-frami...
04/06/2026
This recent grad from Spring, TX, led creative-video output for the Aggies' men's basketball team last season and has been producing video and creating ...
04/06/2026
For the first time at a women's golf major, every player in the field will r...
04/06/2026
Three Panasonic PT-RQ45 40,000-lumen 3-Chip DLP projectors made their first live...
04/06/2026
Bitmovin and Akamai have announced a collaboration with NRJ Group, a French mult...
04/06/2026
Telestream will exhibit at InfoComm 2026 (Booth N7952), demonstrating media work...
04/06/2026
Sony has announced the development of RIALTO 65, a 65mm format image sensor block for the VENICE 2 digital cinema camera, targeting release in the first half of...
04/06/2026
KOKUSAI DENKI Electric America will exhibit at InfoComm 2026 (Booth N8025, June ...
04/06/2026
Bell Media's TSN and RDS are the exclusive Canadian broadcasters of FIFA Wor...
04/06/2026
The Challenge: Receiving Heavy Media Files From Road Games Quickly and ReliablyT...
04/06/2026
MASV, a managed file transfer platform used in broadcast and live sports product...
04/06/2026
NESN has announced the appointment of Fahad Haider as Vice President of Operations and Engineering. Haider returns to NESN, where he previously served as Vice P...
04/06/2026
David J. Halberstam, who spent almost 50 years in sports as a broadcaster and an executive, died June 2 after a years-long battle with brain cancer.
Over his l...
04/06/2026
Although collegiate production programs are tasked with delivering high-quality ...
04/06/2026
California studio, two production trucks, global distribution system are combine...
04/06/2026
New global program empowers and supports storytellers through scriptwriting course and access to industry experts
TikTok and Sundance Institute today announce...
04/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
04/06/2026
Bitmovin, a leading provider of video streaming infrastructure, and Akamai, the cybersecurity and cloud computing company that powers and protects business onli...
04/06/2026
American Underground (AU), the Startup Hub of the South and a community of mor...
04/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
04/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
04/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
04/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
04/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
04/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
04/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
04/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
04/06/2026
NVIDIA and Microsoft Reinvent Windows PCs for the Age of Personal AI
Brie Clayton June 3, 2026
0 Comments
RTX Spark - a 1-Petaflop Superchip, the Full...
04/06/2026
Inside the Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man Grade
Brie Clayton June 3, 2026
0 Comments
Simone Grattarola discusses shaping the look in DaVinci Resolve...
04/06/2026
Cine Gear Expo Announces 2026 Awards of Excellence Recipients
Brie Clayton June 3, 2026
0 Comments
Ed Lachman ASC, Caleb Deschanel ASC, and M. David M...
04/06/2026
St. Vincents Live with Orchestra Tour to Feature Berklee Alum Ruby Plume Berklee alumni St. Vincent and Ruby Plume will appear on the same bill across seven d...
04/06/2026
Home to cutting-edge sovereign AI infrastructure and robotics innovators, as well as one of the world's most passionate gaming communities, South Korea is o...
04/06/2026
Back to All News
All the Truth in My Lies Coming to Netflix on August 28
Entertainment
04 June 2026
GlobalSpain
Link copied to clipboard
Download the imag...
04/06/2026
Back to All News
Larry Tanz, VP of Content, EMEA, Delivers a Keynote Speech at ...
04/06/2026
Back to All News
Turn Your Living Room into a Stadium With the New FIFA World ...
04/06/2026
Keeping conversations real on LinkedIn Published on Jun 4, 2026 Categories: Product News
LinkedIn Corporate Communications
Share
LinkedIn
Facebook ...
04/06/2026
June's forecast with GeForce NOW: 100% chance of gaming.
GeForce NOW is lining up new adventures for the month, from big-name blockbusters to quirky indies...
03/06/2026
SES and Viva, Mexico's ultra low-cost airline, have launched multi-orbit satellite inflight connectivity on Viva's Airbus aircraft. A total of 60 A320s ...
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.
