For Blake Gordon, general manager of digital trading at Georgia-Pacific Recycling, defining next-generation technology can be boiled down to a simple question: Does it simplify something that is unnecessarily complex? If so, it’s next-gen.
But it’s also subjective to the industry in question, he added during a presentation at the Recycled Materials Association’s 2025 conference in San Diego last week.
When it comes to emerging software technologies like artificial intelligence, that’s a helpful consideration in gauging how useful different types of AI are for recycling businesses. For example, agentic AI — the type of AI that can make decisions and is sometimes used to replace human interaction in business — might not make as much sense in the recycling space, Gordon said.
“Relationships mean everything, they mean so much in this industry, they mean more than they do in other industries,” Gordon said. “So where agentic might make sense there, it might not here.”
Instead, he suggested the best aspect of AI in the recycling space is in saving time with unnecessarily complicated tasks.
“Do you have to be on the phone all the time? You spend six hours trying to get a price, and trying to get an idea that it’s a fair price,” Gordon said. Generating that data and streamlining how figures are calculated are among the key utilities AI brings to the business of managing a recycling company. And understanding the specific utility of new technology is vital to successfully incorporating it.
“You try to apply certain technologies to this industry, you’re going to fall flat on your face, because of those nuances that they don’t understand,” Gordon said.
The emerging term for that type of AI utilization is “augmented intelligence,” rather than “artificial.”
“It shouldn’t be making decisions for you, but it should be helping you make decisions, helping you make decisions faster,” Gordon said.
Data is becoming ‘the new oil’
Beyond the time savings, the data that AI tools can generate not only is valuable but will become vital, said Lisa Kagan, co-founder of a scrap metal-focused trading platform called Buddy.
“Whatever industry you’re in, data is necessary,” Kagan said. “Data is the new oil.”
She advised against an approach of waiting too long to adopt data-generating technologies, like AI, because doing so may put companies at a significant disadvantage moving into the future. That’s because AI tools for data analysis learn from their own analyses, improving the longer they are in use.
“It’s like compound interest: If you are a company who is capturing all that data (only) now, you can never catch up with the companies who have been capturing for a while,” Kagan said.
But in the data realm, too, it’s important to be discerning in picking what a company captures and reports out. Geoff Aardsma, vice president of waste management and recycling at software supplier AMCS, said companies can benefit from evaluating their reporting practices.
“Reporting gets a lot of air time: We all love reports, we send reports, we need reports,” he said. “One of the best ways that you can take an easy step into digitization is carve down the amount of data you have flying around, and the effort associated with gathering that data, and help target it at what people actually use.”
That’s something companies will have to do anyway if they bring on a new technology, he added, because typically they’ll need to retire their old reporting structure to use a new platform.
As an early step, ask ‘why’
It can feel overwhelming for businesses to adopt new technologies, the speakers acknowledged, and “in a number of senses, technology is moving faster than the ability to adopt it,” Aardsma noted. But companies can take some initial steps to start or step up their digitization, and those steps involve drilling down to the core of what the company wants to solve.
Kagan advised first figuring out the bottlenecks the company wants to solve – what is holding the company back from doing what it wants to do. With a “problem” identified, the company can then seek out the proper solution rather than simply installing a new technology without knowing what to get from it.
“If you’re just being led by the technology provider and not asking the right questions, the chances are that it may not be a good fit for you,” Kagan said. “It might be a perfectly good product but not something that’s going to solve your problem.”
Gordon advised a similar approach, asking why as much as possible before implementing a solution. Companies should ask why they don’t have time to bring on a new customer or move into a new grade.
“Why don’t you have time for that? Start asking yourself why,” Gordon said. “Sit down, spend an hour as a team, and just ask the question ‘why’ five times.”
Adopting that approach will highlight steps in the business process that could achieve time savings, he said. With that information, companies can pick a solution that addresses the actual source of the slowdown.
A version of this story appeared in Plastics Recycling Update on May 21.
