Owl for Mechanical Recyclers: Proof, Not Promises
Owl use case series: mechanical recycling.
A mechanical recycler lives with a problem most manufacturers never face: the raw material is different every day. Bale to bale, load to load — moisture, contamination and composition vary, and the process has to adapt constantly to still produce recyclate that customers can trust.
At the same time, the pressure to prove things is growing fast. The EU's Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) sets binding recycled-content targets for packaging, and buyers increasingly want documentation: what went in, what came out, and what its quality and carbon footprint are. For a recycler, traceability is turning from a nice-to-have into a condition for market access.
The problem is not a lack of data — it's where the data lives
Most recycling lines already produce plenty of information: scale tickets, sorting data, lab results, energy meters, machine logs. But it lives in separate systems, spreadsheets and paper, and assembling it into an answer — for an auditor, a customer or your own process development — is manual work that happens after the fact.
This is exactly the kind of fragmentation our Owl platform was built to remove: it consolidates scattered production information into a single, unified view, collected automatically at the source.
What Owl can do on a recycling line
- Batch-level traceability from input to output — which input lots ended up in which output batch, so recycled-content claims stand on data rather than estimates
- Process and quality data per batch — throughput, temperatures, moisture and lab results linked to the lot they belong to
- Energy per tonne of output — the number that drives both cost and the carbon footprint of the recyclate
- Automated sustainability reporting — the ESG and regulatory documentation assembles itself as production runs, instead of being reconstructed at audit time
Live dashboards and alarms do the same job they do in any plant: when the process drifts, you hear about it now — not at shift handover.
Start where the pain is
Owl scales from a single device to the whole line, so a recycler doesn't need a system overhaul to get started. A common first step is one line and one question — often "what does a tonne of good output actually cost us in energy?" or "can we show a customer exactly what went into this batch?" From there, coverage grows device by device.
Traceability of recycled material is ultimately solved together with the value chain: your data becomes part of your customer's recycled-content evidence, and their requirements shape what you collect. Being the recycler whose data chain already works is a genuine commercial advantage.
Recyclate buyers are starting to ask for proof. Get in touch — let's make sure you have it.