The past five years has seen a host of regulatory, environmental, social, technical and geopolitical developments that have weighed upon global systems of materials creation, use and disposal. Despite a push for circularity in our industrial systems, the continued spread of regulations such as Extended Producer Responsibility and the impact of supply side shocks, globally, we still have a waste problem.
Waste generation globally continues to grow and is predicted to reach 3.4 billion tonnes by 2040 1. Rising levels of waste are also linked to the rapid growth in consumption. The 2024 Circularity Gap report notes that over 90% of the materials extracted and used to make products and packaging, ultimately become waste. In essence, only 7.2% of these materials are fed back into the production system. This is poor from a resource efficiency and climate perspective. For example, according to the United Nations International Resources Panel, in 2015, the production of materials accounted for 23% of global carbon emissions (up from 15% in 1995). 2
While the media focus has been on household and consumer waste, globally, the volume of industrial waste generation is 18 times greater. The infrastructure sector is responsible for 30% of such waste, but next on the list and growing rapidly is material generated by manufacturers. Global manufacturing output is more than $40 trillion per year, however, 20% of every dollar spent in manufacturing is wasted, due to inefficiencies. 3
Equally across the industrial system globally the past five years has seen significant developments in the technology available to create, measure, track and process materials and underpin new circular business models. If we think about the players in this system that have traditionally handled and processed much of this material, the waste and recycling sector, it too has been adopting new technologies. As elsewhere, these technologies and innovations span sensing, robotics, industrial automation and machine learning.
Specifically, there has been widespread deployment of sensor systems that measure the volume of material in containers and vehicles – the ‘internet of bins’. For example, City of Edinburgh Council has installed 11,000 such sensors across its on-street bin estate to monitor and optimise container deployment and collection.
Sensors or smart labels are also at play in the world of reusable packaging and goods – embedded in a substrate that allows the asset to be tracked. This kind of technology will underpin product passports and drive re-usable systems. The latter is also driven by new regulations such as the EU’s push for Digital Product Passports (DPP). Equally, in September 2025, the European Parliament approved new measures to prevent waste food and textiles. In the latter case, textile producers will have to sign up to an Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) programme, requiring them to cover the cost of collection, sorting and recycling of textile products. Such an EPR scheme will require the use of digital technologies to measure and track material through the sale and recovery cycle.
In the UK, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs mandatory digital waste tracking system is set to be rolled out from Spring 2026. After various iterations, this system will mirror tax reporting and require all waste and recycling operators to use software systems that can readily export data on waste collections into the system run by the four UK environmental regulators. At the same time, England, Scotland and Northern Ireland will see the roll-out of a Deposit Return Scheme (DRS) for for single-use plastic and metal drinks containers. Beverage producers will add a refundable deposit to the cost of a product. This will be redeemable via a network of reverse vending machines that will read the ‘smart’ labels on each returned container. The aim is to reduce high levels of littering, improve recovery rates and generate high quality recycled material with a financial incentive to return the item into the recycling system.
So, sensors and smart labels allied to software systems will underpin more circularity within product value chains. Which is very positive.
Equally, the global technology landscape is morphing thanks to the rapid deployment of AI driven applications. AI deployment across the waste and recycling sector has focused on machine vision systems that are used to drive robotic sorting of packaging waste. This is improving recycling rates and giving FMCG brands a clearer view of how much of their packaging is being recovered. At a micro-scale, machine vision and weighing solutions are being deployed in commercial real estate to measure recycling and general waste. Hospitality operators are also using such digital systems to measure food waste and drive reductions.
While these applications are positive, they make the current paradigm of waste management and recycling work more efficiently. Equally such systems only see material in one part of the overall waste value chain. So, bin fill sensors see material put into on-street bins – but nothing after the bin is emptied. Machine vision systems only see material coming into and through Material Recovery Facilities (MRFs) – they do not track it beyond that site. Bin sensor systems do not qualify the type of material and machine vision systems only measure that which they are trained to identify. The challenge with the global urban and industrial waste system is that the pathways for all this material – recyclable, general, hazardous – are complex. So how can the much- vaunted power of AI, drive systemic change, given the scale of the challenges we face in terms of global materials use and associated carbon emissions.
Looking beyond the UK, the generation, movement and processing of waste is a dynamic system of material flowing around organisations and territories. These materials emerge from operational sites (depending on the nature of the organisation). They are then collected by third parties (haulers/carriers) and moved to locations, often operated by other supply-chain entities, where the material may be sorted, processed and moved onto other sites and transformations. Depending on where you operate and the type of material, what happens to it will depend on the amount, value, costs, the haulers and contractors, the infrastructure, the regulations and a host of other factors. Reconciling this ‘map’ of material movements with the ‘territory’ of what happens within waste supply-chains in different regions and countries is what my company Resordinate does. Our WasteMap® data pipeline solution is used by sustainability teams in global corporations to make sense of the complex and messy data in their waste and recycling supply chains. We turn this into standardised, auditable data, generating actionable intelligence on which our customers can act. These actions cover process changes to reduce waste, cost savings and revenue generation (from material), optimising contractual arrangements across the supply chain and the measurement of waste related carbon emissions. This also enables customers to readily ‘report’ to ESG frameworks such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) or feed into compliance systems such as UK waste tracking.
Looking to the next five years, there will undoubtedly be wider deployments of sensor, data and robotic systems underpinning a more efficient and effective materials system – supporting circular business models. These systems will be deployed by city and national government, waste and recycling operators and the organisations that produce waste. Through judicious and widespread digitisation, it is possible to build ‘digital twins’ of complex, global value-chains that can enable the systemic changes needed to reduce waste at source and maximise the recovery of material. The data present within this global system is highly variable and incomplete. However, it is this very complexity, that lends itself to the power of digitisation and AI to automate, process and analyse large datasets and create a clean view of the system. While technology can be the enabler, growing the global measure of circularity will also need regulation, investment and a realignment of priorities.