How IT Is Transforming The Recycling Sector

Data insights are changing when, where and how your waste is handled

Waste collection isn't the first port of call when you think about IT, but information and analytics increasingly run the show.

Thibault Sevestre is head of the office of the CIO at Renewi, a Dutch waste management firm operating across Europe. He says new regulations have helped raise the money to make new IT investments, by raising demand for recycling services and materials.

"The relative scarcity of recycled materials is pulling the value up, and that's creating more room for us to invest in the recycling."

It's not all plain sailing. Raw materials are still easier and cheaper to come by than recycled ones.

"We're competing with virgin material manufacturers - so, oil and gas companies that are pumping billions of barrels of oil, and then they have a pipeline that goes to a chemical processing plant and then plastics comes out in billions of tons... We've got small quantities of everything everywhere...

"That's the challenge of our industry: until you had the regulatory pressure, just transporting that waste to a place where you can refine it was cost-prohibitive."

Pressure on manufacturers is only set to increase, with laws like the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) coming into force.

According to Thibault, "a large part" of Renewi's IT work now is to feed information back to customers, to help them with their regulatory reporting. That involves making information available through portals and APIs, so they can connect to their own reporting systems.

"I think we're seeing an explosion of the number of data points and the complexity that we need to provide, so we're building a comparable infrastructure as we have for financial management and for financial reporting, but for sustainability reporting, recording, accountability and traceability."

Data for good

Data insights are also useful internally. As Renewi - and the recycling industry - grows, "the complexity is growing beyond what a site manager or product manager can manage," so there's more call for information systems.

This is where APIs come in, again - although not just for reporting. Renewi is also using APIs for integration and information sharing with partners.

"In the Netherlands we run - with our competitor, SUEZ - a joint collection program called the Green Collective, where we keep the competition on the commercial side, but we pull together the work orders in certain cities to minimize the number of trucks and the number of kilometers we drive; so we integrate our information systems.

"They send us the pickups that need to be done in the zip codes we're responsible for, we send them the pick-ups where they're responsible, and we continuously exchange information like this."

Being competitors, the companies had to structure their collaboration in a way that wouldn't give either a competitive advantage but would minimize their environmental impact and costs. The benefits are tangible.

"You have shared planning capacity and shared routing capacity, which also allows us to make investments in electric trucks. We used to have two big diesel trucks, and suddenly we have the capacity to allocate capital investment to a zero-emission vehicle."

That's not just because of the money saved. Better optimization has meant fewer miles driven and higher route density, making electric vehicles more viable - a benefit "built on information exchange."

We're changing the way we're organizing the company

That knowledge sharing experience is seeping in to Renewi's own organizational structure, increasing collaboration.

"The same phenomenon that you have in going from local-for-local to a globally integrated chain means we're changing the way we're organising the company, how we're collaborating and how we're making choices and designs... Knowledge that was on the sites, on ‘How do you recycle, how do you create a plant', is now getting into central teams that are collaborating across locations."

As Thibault points out, the recycling sector has historically been a very local one, mostly because of material transport costs. Collaborative systems are changing the nature of the business.

"That's reflected in the second generation of solutions we're putting in place, where we're replacing local-for-local infrastructure technologies like ERP, like asset management and maintenance, like procurement - all these global processes are now coming into one shared resource and one shared environment."

Renewi's next step is to harmonize processes across its 150 sites, which currently have huge variance; some are heavily automated, while others are entirely manual. All are now being equipped to collaborate and share information.

"That's the basis we tend to use to start automating the next level, which is optimizing our chain; so, making decisions on which volumes need to go to which plant, and where do we need to build our next recycling plant, because that's where the volumes are coming from and that's where the customers are located.

"Today we do a lot of that empirically, based on people's best knowledge."

Going with your gut

Sharing information is already helping Renewi locate its new sites. In the Netherlands, that means building closer to canals to use large boats to move volumes of waste, rather than ground transport: a far more efficient approach, and one only possible due to the way the recycling business has scaled in recent years.

But there is still a place for empiric decisions. For example, deciding where to recycle glass is easy, due to the limited number of very large customers.

"It can still be overseen by human intelligence," says Thibault. "It becomes a lot more complex for generic materials, like plastics that are in everything and that are used by everybody. There you need IT to start optimizing where you need to be."

That works in "a number of different ways," and the backbone is all about clarity. Renewi is focusing on creating transparency in two areas: the capacity of each site to produce different materials, and their inventories & planning.

With that data clear and readily available, the team has integrated it into the lead-to-order processes in Salesforce; that, in turn, gives a view of the demand forecast.

"We're trying to grow an understanding of material customers," says Thibault. "All of the systems we've put in place

have the ability to do scenario planning, and once we have that base data available we'll be able to unlock the next level: looking at what kinds of customers [we have], where are they located, what are the logistics flows we need to envision and therefore where do we need to be located?"

It might be "two-and-a-half to three years" before Renewi can do that, but the outcome will be a central planning team with more efficiency, informed decision-making and insights across the business: a true IT transformation success story.

This article was originally published on our sister site Computing.