Material recovery infrastructure giant CP Group has acquired a majority stake in Recycleye, the London-based AI vision sorting company — combining the world’s largest MRF integrator with one of the more established AI sorting platforms in the waste sector.
The deal formalises what was already a working relationship. CP Group and Recycleye have jointly deployed Vivid-AI optical sorters across 23 facilities in the US and Europe since 2023. Vivid AI pairs AI-driven material recognition with air ejection — higher throughput and lower maintenance compared to robotic arm-based sorting.
Recycleye’s system handles real-time material identification across robotic and belt-based sorting configurations. Practically, that means higher purity output, reduced reliance on manual sorters, and live composition data for facility operators.
The acquisition adds last-chance sorting capability at line endpoints, recovering residual material value that would otherwise be lost. CP Group now claims the largest deployed fleet of AI-only optical sorters in Europe — a meaningful operational benchmark in a sector where accuracy and throughput directly determine revenue.
Recycleye’s team remains in place serving its existing international customer base, and both companies will collaborate on US and European expansion under the new structure.
The strategic logic is straightforward: CP Group gets proprietary AI sorting technology embedded in its integration business; Recycleye gets infrastructure scale and a direct route to MRF deployments globally. Consolidation in waste-tech AI is accelerating as facilities push for automation to offset labour costs and tightening contamination standards.
