Kanopy integrates recycling monitoring and AI tools under new parent company

Dive Brief:

Recycle Coach, a platform that offers recycling information for residents and local governments, will now operate under a new parent company, Kanopy Technology.
Re-Trac, a software company for collecting and managing recycling data, will also join Kanopy as one of its brands. Prairie Robotics, an AI-enabled waste monitoring tech company, will become Kanopy’s strategic partner.
Kanopy plans to soon roll out a new tool, Curb Coach, which will help residents find collection information and updates for garbage, yard waste and other non-recycling services.

Dive Insight:

The creation of Kanopy comes as responsibility for managing recycling services is “increasingly fragmented, spread across cities, haulers, and agencies, and no single tool covers all of it,” Recycle Coach said in a statement.

Launching Kanopy is an effort to consolidate and streamline different recycling technologies and capabilities, making it easier for its partners to find the right tool, said Jessica Fantauzzo, Recycle Coach’s head of marketing, in an email.

Each of the groups under Kanopy represent different aspects of the waste and recycling stream, she said. Recycle Coach helps communicate with residents before collection, while Prairie Robotics aims to prevent contamination at the point of collection by using AI-powered cameras to monitor materials that enter trucks. Meanwhile, Re-Trac collects information and data about the stream, she said.

Jeff Galad, Recycle Coach’s president and CEO, will become CEO of Kanopy Technology. “Kanopy is how we bring the best of it together and keep building, for municipalities, haulers, and everyone responsible for this work, however their role changes,” he said in a statement.

Toronto-based Recycle Coach, established 25 years ago, has offered its app for the last 10 years as a tool to communicate local disposal, drop-off and curbside rules. It has worked with municipalities such as East Lansing, Michigan; Olympia, Washington; and Aurora, Ontario.

Recycle Coach won’t change its app-based services under Kanopy, but Fantauzzo said the company plans to expand how it connects with municipalities and other partners to help cut down on contamination issues and offer easy-to-find recycling information.

The upcoming Curb Coach app is a continuation of those services, she said. In states and provinces that have adopted extended producer responsibility laws, “a growing number of municipalities no longer oversee curbside recycling,” she said. Yet those municipalities may still be responsible for coordinating garbage, yard waste, household hazardous waste and other services.

Curb Coach is meant to offer clear answers on waste-related services, similar to how Recycle Coach tackles recycling-related info, she said.

The new Kanopy parent structure “is what makes it possible to now serve those municipalities properly, instead of something that possibly adds more confusion for residents,” she said.

Kanopy will also add Re-Trac to the group, with its current CEO, Josh Reid, continuing to lead that company. Re-Trac works with 13 state agencies, including the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection and the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, as well as numerous local governments across North America.

Kanopy sees Re-Trac’s data collection, reporting and compliance services as an important component of the new company, especially as state and local agencies are increasingly on the hook to track and provide more granular recycling data under new EPR and recycled content laws.

Kanopy is also working with a strategic partner, Prairie Robotics. The company is known for its truck-mounted cameras that use AI capabilities to help identify contamination in recycling carts during collection. The company then uses the data to conduct outreach with households to help improve sortation.

Recycle Coach and Prairie Robotics’ technologies are already integrated to enable push notifications that alert residents about contamination or sorting issues. Fantauzzo says the formalized partnership between Kanopy and Prairie Robotics aims “to grow and evolve what that integration does, and how it brings value and impact to communities.”