waste-sorting robotics company · Drones, Robotics & Autonomous Systems

Recycleye

A London waste-sorting robotics company, started by Imperial College students, that uses cameras, AI and robot arms to sort recycling.

About Recycleye

Recycleye builds machines that sort rubbish so more of it can be recycled. Its systems use cameras and computer vision to identify materials such as plastics, aluminium, paper and cardboard as they travel along a conveyor belt, and robots then pick or blow the items into the right bins. Its products include Recycleye Vision, which does the identifying, a robotic picker that pairs the vision system with a robot arm, and an analytics dashboard that shows plant managers how a recycling facility is performing. A later report describes a compact robot-arm machine and a faster air-jet machine that can sort up to 2,000 items a minute.

The company was founded in 2019 by two Imperial College London Master's students: Victor Dewulf, who studied civil and environmental engineering and is chief executive, and Peter Hedley, who studied computing and is chief technical officer. Its stated mission, in a 2021 interview, is to remove the "dull, dirty, and dangerous manual jobs" from recycling. The robotic picker was developed with Fanuc and the UK's Manufacturing Technology Centre, a link that shows how UK research centres help small firms build real machines.

Recycleye is a London company. A 2021 interview said its vision systems were in use in the UK, France and India and that its robotic picker was working at two UK recycling facilities. In 2026 Imperial College reported that CP Group, a San Diego-based company, had taken a majority stake. The article said the 45-person Recycleye team would remain in place and continue serving international customers from London. This means the company is now partly owned from abroad but still operates in the UK under its own name.

On people and culture, the company grew from two people to 14 in 2020 and to about 45 by 2026, according to those two reports. Job boards list roles across software engineering, electrical and mechanical technicians, sales and partnerships, and talent and people management. We did not find a culture or values page, so descriptions of life there come only from outside coverage and from its founders' own words about wanting to make dangerous jobs safer.

For a student, Recycleye shows how climate-minded engineering turns into real jobs. Teams include machine-learning and computer-vision engineers, robotics and mechanical engineers, electrical technicians who install and look after machines in factories, and commercial staff who work with recycling companies. Useful subjects include maths, computing, physics, engineering and environmental science. The company's website is the place to check for current openings.

What they do

Key facts

Website: recycleye.com

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