Founded by Peter Hedley and Victor Dewulf, Recycleye has a founding story that sounds so clichéd it’s hard to believe it is true. But its parents’ garage origin story belies a world-changing product that has attracted significant funding and the interest of major partners.
Starting with £1.2 million from a funding round led by MMC Venture and Playfair Capital as well as grants from Innovate UK and the EU, Recycleye has developed its innovative technology to a position where the product is ready to transform waste management industry. Recycling is not just a matter of being environmentally aware; the purity of recycling is vital, and, until Recycleye, the task was almost entirely manual.
Changing the world from his parents’ garage
Hedley and Dewulf first met at university and, after following different career paths for a few years came together to start Recycleye. Dewulf, was starting a PhD in computer vision and recognised the potential application in the waste industry. Their vision was to create a system that could identify and sort individual materials in waste streams. Recycling is, largely, categorised by its purity. Mixed waste has, unsurprisingly, no value. But when waste streams have purer concentrations of recyclable material it increases in value, the purer the recycling the more value it has. This reflects the recycling processes, plastics that are contaminated with other substances, or even other types of plastic, cannot be recycled to the same high grade....