Artificial Intelligence : Bollegraaf ONE brings AI and digital intelligence to smart recycling plant operations

The demands facing modern recycling plants have rarely been greater. Changing material streams, tighter quality requirements, labour shortages, rising costs and the need for maximum uptime are putting facility managers under constant pressure — while expectations for performance continue to rise.

For years, meeting those expectations has depended heavily on operator experience, manual interventions and reacting to problems after they occur. Bollegraaf ONE, the new digital platform launched by the Bollegraaf Group, is designed to change that model fundamentally.

Rather than responding to issues after the fact, Bollegraaf ONE gives operators the tools to anticipate, understand and act — shifting facilities from a reactive footing to a more intelligent, data-driven one. As the company puts it, this is not just a digital tool. It is a new operating model for the recycling industry.

Bollegraaf ONE is built around three core principles. The first is observation: full visibility across the plant through live dashboards, machine data, bunker levels, throughput monitoring and key performance indicators. The second is navigation: identifying root causes, detecting anomalies early, prioritising actions and receiving intelligent recommendations that help teams make better decisions faster. The third is evolution: moving toward predictive and autonomous operations through continuous optimisation, hazard forecasting, adaptive settings and smarter maintenance planning.

Together, these principles are designed to produce a facility that becomes more transparent, more predictable and more efficient over time. Tom Wijkel, Product Manager and project lead for Bollegraaf ONE, described the problem the platform is built to solve: "Recycling plants are becoming more complex every year, while expectations for performance continue to rise. Our customers need more than data, they need clarity, guidance, and confidence. Bollegraaf ONE delivers exactly that. It helps people spend less time reacting to problems and more time improving performance."

The operational benefits of Bollegraaf ONE are wide-ranging. The platform is designed to deliver reduced unplanned downtime, higher throughput and improved recovery rates, better product quality and purity consistency, more efficient maintenance routines, faster decision-making based on real data, lower dependency on individual expertise and improved control over the full process.

Critically, Bollegraaf ONE has been developed with direct input from real customer needs — reflecting the company's belief that intelligence should be embedded into every decision a plant makes.

Bollegraaf ONE combines the Bollegraaf Group's decades of recycling process knowledge with advanced analytics and AI-driven technologies. The platform has been developed in close collaboration with WaDaCon, a waste data consulting firm specialising in AI optimisations of recycling plant performance, and powered by Greyparrot, the leading waste intelligence platform with the largest global deployment of AI waste analytics.

Mikela Druckman, CEO of Greyparrot, welcomed the collaboration: "We're proud to support Bollegraaf in advancing more connected, data-driven recycling operations with the launch of Bollegraaf ONE. Having deployed the largest fleet of AI waste analytics systems in the market (250+ Greyparrot Analyzers), Greyparrot has built a unique dataset and deep understanding of material flows at scale. Collaborating with Bollegraaf and the industry to be the material data layer is an important step towards more integrated, intelligent smart facilities that will push the boundaries of what's possible in resource recovery."

Bollegraaf ONE represents a significant step in the longer journey towards autonomous recycling facilities — plants where operations continuously improve through connected systems, predictive intelligence and informed human decision-making.

The platform is available now and is being showcased at IFAT 2026 in Munich, where visitors can experience firsthand how it is helping to shape the future of recycling operations. For an industry navigating rapid change, it signals that the tools to manage that complexity are no longer on the horizon — they are already on the factory floor.