Going digital

As more and more processes become digital, how will increasing digitization change the waste and recycling landscape?

Resourcify, a Hamburg, Germany-based company connecting waste generators with recyclers and waste management firms, aims to help businesses manage, track and improve their recycling processes through its online waste management platform.

“The waste producers can send orders to the recycler and the recycler can send back all kinds of information, [including] documentation, qualifications, certificates [and] reclamations,” Resourcify co-founder Felix Heinricy says.  

By connecting recycler partners with waste generators, the platform enables automatic data flow. The software tracks the amount of material generated, material quality, which recycler is picking it up, pickup frequency and where materials will ultimately be recycled.

Heinricy says collected data can help track CO₂ emissions reductions, which materials are recycled more and the cost of recycling.

“We see how much the recycling was costing [and] how much you would need to spend to have a higher recycling pathway," he says.

Rescourify manages approximately 100 million tons of discarded materials, with more than 3 million disposal orders processed through the software annually and more than 25,000 active locations.

The company targets large waste generators with complex waste streams, such as airports, hospitals, retailers, manufacturing companies and construction companies. Resourcify clients include McDonalds, Germany’s University Hospital Bonn and processing and packaging solutions company Syntegon Technology.

Onboarding and operations

When Resourcify onboards a new client, it takes the client’s existing waste contracts and digitizes them. From there, all relevant information regarding containers, bins, locations, materials and partnered recyclers is available through the software.

“Then, the … user can log in via browser, app or QR [quick response] code, for example, and can order containers with their specific recyclers,” Heinricy explains.

With greater transparency, waste generators can evaluate the cost of recycling and the amount of materials being discarded versus recycled, which Heinricy says can lead to more circular solutions.

These solutions include takeback programs, which Resourcify designs for clients and product manufacturers to save single-use materials from incineration or landfill. Heinricy highlights the growing demand of takeback programs, specifically for product manufacturers that cannot change the recyclability of their single-use products.

Through the software, single-use device manufacturers can manage the program and monitor success in real-time, recyclers can manage locations and orders and waste generators can manage pickups and access dashboards showing waste and CO₂-reduction statistics, according to Resourcify.

The company’s partnership with medical technologies company Johnson & Johnson works to minimize waste at hospitals through one of these takeback programs.

“We set up this whole circularity takeback program for this [single-use Johnson & Johnson] instrument to get back to … the recycler to then be recycled and not incinerated,” Heinricy says. “We also educate … our customers [about] how to run materials in a circle.”

More than 450 waste management firms and recyclers are connected to the Resourscify platform in Germany, including Veolia and PreZero.

“They deliver the data we need to actually make our product really work,” Heinricy says of Resourcify’s waste management and recycling partners. “We are working with them together, creating more automatic processes, supporting them to receive the data in high quality [so] they can execute their jobs better.”

The digital future

In September 2023, Resourcify raised 14 million euros, or $15.3 million, in Series A funding. In a news release announcing the achievement, Resourcify CEO Gary Lewis said this funding would support the company’s expansion across Europe.

“Our next step is that we want to go international,” Heinricy says. The company primarily operates in German-speaking countries, like Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Heinricy says the waste and recycling industry is “very undigitized,” with many waste generators still relying on fax machines to share information with waste management companies and recyclers. Resourcify not only eliminates the need to call or fax information in favor of automated processes, but also utilizes the collected data, allowing clients to optimize their operations.

“In the end, the user has full transparency [and] visibility of their entire waste data with the push of a button,” Heinricy says. “[They’re] then able to decide to optimize their waste [and recycling] if they want to.”