Key Highlights
- Albertsons and Costco utilize Smarter Sorting to reduce waste and lessen carbon emissions.
- Smarter Sorting provides a way to decrease regulatory costs by showing companies exactly what is in their products through an enormous and constantly growing database of ingredients.
Trash is a huge carbon offender. Most of that waste could be repurposed or recycled if only it were better identified and sorted. That is where a startup known as Smarter Sorting comes in.
Both retailers and manufacturers must comply with thousands of regulations for managing and disposing of consumer products. So when it comes to recycling or repurposing products, rather than facing even more regulations, they always trash them.
Smarter Sorting enters the picture by providing a way to decrease regulatory costs by showing companies exactly what is in their products through an enormous and constantly growing database of ingredients.
Jacqueline Claudia, CEO of Smarter Sorting, said they have a huge data set, over 456 billion data points, on what products are and their physical and chemical attributes. They started that database for regulatory compliance to help companies understand how to make, market and move them safely, environmentally, compliantly and efficiently.
Using the Smarter Sorting information to determine what is in the product, especially if any ingredients are toxic, retailers and manufacturers can make more informed decisions on how best to handle its inevitable disposal.
Covered products include food, plastics, chemicals, product packaging etc. By identifying every ingredient, Smarter Sorting can inform a company, particularly how to better dispose of it, recycle it, or, perhaps in the case of food, donate it to a food bank. Albertsons, Costco and Wegmans are clients.
Smarter Sorting also works with Republic Services, one of the largest environmental waste services companies in the United States.
Backers of Smarter Sorting include Regeneration VC and G2 Venture Partners, with just over $55 million overall funding to date.
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