An AI-powered camera system that profiles waste streams within recycling facilities has been included among a selection of Best Inventions by TIME.
To compile this year’s list, the news and current affairs magazine solicited nominations from across the globe with a special focus on emerging fields such as AI. Inventions were evaluated on several key factors, including originality, efficacy, ambition, and global impact.
Greyparrot’s Analyzer was listed among the innovations set to change the world by unlocking waste intelligence. Greyparrot is a UK-based tech company specialising in this combination of vision, AI and waste analytics.
The group says it aims to tackle the blind spot that exists when it comes to understanding what happens to waste materials once they leave the bin – a knowledge gap that limits recycling efficiency and obstructs the shift toward reusable, circular systems.
The AI-powered camera system captures and analyses waste streams in real time within recycling facilities. It classifies materials across 111 distinct categories and identifies packaging types and brands at an industrial scale – far beyond the capabilities of manual sampling.
The Analyzer can track 99% of material passing through a recycling facility. What would take a person 375 hours to manually sample takes the Analyzer just six hours, giving recyclers live data to boost efficiency, cut landfill, and recover more valuable resources.
“This unprecedented visibility, generated from the analysis of over 100 billion waste items this year alone, unlocks actionable insights across the entire waste value chain,” said the group. “These insights enabled the launch of Greyparrot’s Deepnest platform – a first-of-its-kind analytics tool that lets brands and packaging producers measure the true recyclability of their products as they move through the global waste system.”
Built and manufactured in the UK, the Analyzer is also constructed from recycled materials and features modular, replaceable parts for long-term durability.
“Waste has long been one of humanity’s greatest blind spots,” said Ambarish Mitra, Co-founder of Greyparrot. “The Analyzer doesn’t just see waste, it understands it. It turns chaos into clarity, giving us truth in real time about what we throw away, what gets recovered, and what doesn’t. Being recognised by TIME is more than an honour; it’s validation that AI can transform the post-consumption world into a visible, valuable system – one that helps solve our planet’s most urgent challenges. This also marks the next big conversation in climate action: moving beyond carbon and using waste intelligence to track, recover and reuse the products we produce.”