Greyparrot's AI waste analytics have determined that 89% of the aluminum passing through Circular Services' Sunset Park materials recovery facility in Brooklyn is recoverable — roughly 91,000 cans per day. The figure anchors a pilot the two companies now plan to scale up, with potential deployment across Circular Services' 38-MRF portfolio.

Circular Services installed Greyparrot's Analyzer software at Sunset Park in the first quarter of this year. It marks the company's first use of the AI platform anywhere in its network, according to Jamie Lowrey, vice president of east recycling operations.

So far, the system has run in passive monitoring mode, watching the facility's material streams through cameras rather than actively controlling sorting equipment. That changes this fall.

What happens this fall?

Circular Services confirmed it will shift from observation to active testing of the platform's operational value.

"[We] will be running several projects in partnership with Greyparrot this fall where we will assess the impacts from the system's alerts to our facility management about commodity quality and its detailed reporting on production," a company spokesperson said.

Lowrey said in an emailed statement that the collaboration could lead to additional deployment of Greyparrot's technology across the company's full portfolio of 38 MRFs. No timeline for a broader rollout has been disclosed, and any expansion beyond Sunset Park remains an announced intention rather than committed capital.

Who is behind the technology?

Greyparrot, which builds camera-based waste recognition and analytics systems for MRFs, claims its sorting technology can deliver efficiency gains of 10% to 20%. Across all deployments, the company says its systems have surpassed 1 trillion waste detections.

The vendor has been scaling aggressively. In July, Greyparrot announced a $27 million Series B round led by technology investor Omar Mir. The company said it will use the funding to expand its AI, data science and product teams to sharpen the insights it sells to MRF operators.

Greyparrot estimated that, as of July, its systems deployed at MRFs had identified more than $2.5 billion in recoverable value in the material streams they monitor.

Ambarish Mitra, cofounder of Greyparrot, framed the Sunset Park results in terms of untapped domestic supply.

"Waste intelligence makes that visible for the first time, and what it shows is domestic supply hiding in plain sight," Mitra said in a statement.

Why aluminum, and why now?

The two companies announced the pilot expansion in a joint release on Wednesday, citing 2024 research from the Aluminum Association and the Can Manufacturers Institute showing that aluminum can recycling has fallen to its lowest level in decades.

That context matters for the economics of the Sunset Park findings. The companies noted that producing goods from recycled aluminum is up to 95% more energy-efficient than using virgin material, which strengthens the commodity case for recovering the estimated 91,000 cans per day currently moving through the Brooklyn facility.

For Circular Services, higher aluminum capture translates directly into revenue per tonne on a high-value stream — the kind of operational metric that determines whether AI monitoring graduates from pilot to standard equipment.

An existing relationship

The Greyparrot partnership did not start at Sunset Park. Closed Loop Partners, which backs Circular Services, has worked with Greyparrot on previous projects, including a report released last year on using Greyparrot's AI technology to recover food-grade polypropylene in MRFs.

That prior work on polypropylene — a food-contact resin with stringent quality requirements — gave the partners a tested framework for measuring what AI-driven quality alerts actually deliver on a processing line, experience that now informs the fall projects at Sunset Park.

Circular Services is also expanding beyond recycling infrastructure. On Tuesday, the company announced its acquisition of Re:Dish, a reusable food service ware company serving large clients.

What decides what happens next?

The fall pilot projects are the milestone to watch. Circular Services has committed to assessing two specific outputs: the system's real-time alerts to facility management on commodity quality, and its detailed production reporting.

If those projects demonstrate measurable gains in recovery rates and commodity quality — against the baseline of 89% recoverable aluminum already quantified — a rollout decision across the 38-MRF portfolio follows. Until then, the deployment remains a single-facility pilot with a stated option to scale.

The $27 million Series B gives Greyparrot the runway to refine the product side of that equation. Whether Circular Services converts its option into capital spending is the market signal the MRF AI segment will read next.