Greyparrot has launched a new dashboard that uses real-time artificial intelligence (AI) data to track overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) at materials recovery facilities (MRFs) and plastics recovery facilities (PRFs).
The OEE dashboard is initially available to selected Greyparrot Analyzer customers with site-wide installations of the company’s AI camera system.
OEE measures three aspects of operational performance: availability, performance and quality. The dashboard calculates all three continuously from live composition data, rather than relying on information collected manually after a shift.
Availability measures uptime against scheduled production time, including unplanned downtime, jams and periods when a line is running without material. Performance compares actual throughput with design capacity, while quality measures contamination and purity across output streams.
Recovery facilities
The company said the quality element has traditionally been difficult to measure continuously at recovery facilities because it requires a mass balance covering material entering the site, material leaving through each outfeed and material lost during processing.
Manual sampling typically covers less than 1 per cent of material and claims that manual logs have reported OEE scores 8 to 15 points higher than the actual figure, according to Greyparrot.
The new dashboard updates the OEE score continuously and can identify changes in individual components of the measure. It also allows operators to compare performance across shifts, lines and sites.
“Recovery facilities are industrial plants, competing with virgin production of materials,” said Mikela Druckman, co-founder and chief executive of Greyparrot. “For the past seven years, we’ve listened closely to our customers and built from understanding what is happening on a single belt to seeing how an entire facility is performing.”
‘The right problem’
Ian McSpirit, operational support manager for recycling at Biffa, said the use of continuous data could help teams identify the causes of operational losses during the same shift.
“Our teams have never been short of operational expertise,” he said. “What continuous data changes is how quickly that expertise can be pointed at the right problem. We can act on the actual cause of a loss on the same shift, rather than reconstructing it from different sources of information.”
More than 300 of Greyparrot’s Analyzers are said to be deployed across more than 20 countries. Facilities using the company’s real-time data have also reported gains of 10 to 30 per cent, with one site saving more than £1.5 million ($2.2m) in a year.
The OEE dashboard is due to be launched at the Resource & Waste Management Expo at the NEC Birmingham on 16 and 17 September.
The company has also been developing applications for the data generated by its AI systems beyond facility operations. In June 2025, Greyparrot launched Deepnest, a platform providing brands with data on how their packaging is sorted, recycled or discarded across waste facilities.
