Today’s packaging teams aren’t just interested in what happens to their materials after use. Tracking the recyclability of their designs is now a financial necessity.
With the arrival of the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR), the EU’s brands and retailers now need to meet stricter design standards and more detailed reporting requirements. If they can’t prove that their packaging gets recovered in real-world waste systems, they’ll soon have to pay for it. Circularity is now a compliance mandate that directly impacts profits.
This shift exposes a critical data gap: recyclability guidelines, lab tests, and specification-driven tools aren’t detailed enough to reflect what happens in real sorting facilities, which is exactly what will decide EPR fees.
Deepnest.ai by Greyparrot fills that knowledge gap, helping producers design more circular products before costs spiral. The Deepnest platform draws from Greyparrot’s global AI waste analytics network, which detects over 440 billion waste objects passing through sorting facilities each year.
Deepnest AI identifies the brand, material and format of those waste objects, revealing which products get recovered, which are lost to landfills – and why. Those insights have already helped some of the world’s largest packaging producers adapt to regulation. They’re using Deepnest to gather evidence of recovery, anticipate regulatory exposure, and reduce EPR liabilities with data-backed design choices.
This session will bring some of those collaborations to life. Attendees will learn how Unilever used Deepnest to track recyclability across multiple product categories, and how our work with The Cup Collective helps McDonald’s, Costa, and Huhtamaki improve recovery rates for their composite packaging.
Greyparrot’s Managing Director Yaseed Chaumoo will explain how producers can follow their lead, aligning brand ambition with regulatory reality. With insights into beauty, luxury, food, drinks and household packaging, it’s a chance for packaging teams to start integrating waste data into design, procurement and sustainability workflows – just in time for PPWR