Climate Week NYC 2026: waste is an unmeasured domestic resource

The conversation at Climate Week NYC 2026 had shifted. Running alongside the UN General Assembly, the week moved away from climate ambition and toward deployment, economics and infrastructure. The questions in the room were practical: what can scale now, who pays for it and what is the measurable return?

Our co-founder Ambarish Mitra spent the week in New York meeting investors, policymakers, CPG brands and producer responsibility organizations. Here's what stood out.

Capital and policy are the constraint

Technology isn't the bottleneck anymore; financing and policy is."

- Ambarish Mitra, Co-founder of Greyparrot

That came up again and again during the week. The tools to see, sort and recover material already exist. What's holding back circular infrastructure is getting capital and policy behind it at the scale required.

Trusted data is what makes circular infrastructure investable

At a World Economic Forum round table, the discussion turned to the capital that needs to flow into recycling and circular infrastructure, and what investors need in return. Recovered material becomes much easier to finance when what is sold into secondary markets can be audited.

We are starting to see what happens when data becomes trusted."

- Ambarish Mitra, Co-founder of Greyparrot

That shift is already under way. In the UK, AI-derived composition data from FCC Environment and Biffa has been submitted to and accepted by the Environment Agency, moving the data beyond operational insight and into evidence regulators can use.

Greyparrot Analyzer has now recorded more than 1 trillion waste detections across 20 countries.

Aluminum is the clearest case

The US needs aluminum for transportation and infrastructure, and imports most of it. Yet a large share of the aluminum Americans already own goes to landfill.

Recycling aluminum takes 95% less energy than producing it from ore, and the metal can be recycled again and again. At Circular Services' Sunset Park MRF in Brooklyn, Greyparrot Analyzers show the plant recovering 89% of the aluminum that crosses its sorting lines, around 91,000 cans a day. Nationally, fewer than four in ten cans are recycled at all.

Landfilled aluminum cans represent roughly 11 million megawatt hours of wasted energy every year, enough to power more than a million homes.

Before we ask where the next ton of aluminum comes from, we should understand how much we are already throwing away."

- Ambarish Mitra, Co-founder of Greyparrot

Climate, energy and economics are now the same conversation

Ambarish's view from New York was that climate, energy and economic realities are now fully intertwined. Our CEO Mikela Druckman made a similar point recently: geopolitical shocks hit resource prices immediately, and material lost to landfill is value a country can't get back.

Materials are being lost where energy is being wasted and where resources can be recovered. Even small efficiency gains can have an enormous impact at a global scale."

- Ambarish Mitra, Co-founder of Greyparrot

Waste as the exception, not the business model

Recycling is one part of the answer. Reduction and reuse come first, and the systems around them need to be designed so less material becomes waste in the first place.

Waste isn't just waste; it's an unmeasured domestic resource."

- Ambarish Mitra, Co-founder of Greyparrot

In conversations with leading CPG brands and producer responsibility organizations, Ambarish saw real willingness to learn, collaborate and change how products are designed and recovered. Data on how packaging actually performs inside recycling facilities is central to that work.

Every material that reaches a recycling facility carries value, energy and supply-chain security. The countries and companies that measure it will be the ones that recover it.

Read the 2026 aluminum report