Portugal's push toward the EU's recycling targets is accelerating. With the 55% material recycling benchmark in view, facilities across the country face mounting pressure to do more with the materials already moving through their plants: recovering more, losing less, and demonstrating performance at a level that manual inspection simply cannot support.
Valorsul, one of Portugal's leading waste recovery and treatment companies, is deploying the Greyparrot Analyzer system across its material recovery facility (MRF). Units are now installed at the infeed, PET product, and residue lines, giving its operations team continuous, real-time visibility into material composition and flow for the first time.
Valorsul's visibility challenge
For most sorting facilities, the picture of what's actually moving through the plant is incomplete. Manual sampling covers less than 1% of throughput — periodic, labour-intensive, and incapable of capturing what's happening across the full stream. Decisions about line configuration, throughput targets, and yield are made with limited information — and when something goes wrong, it often takes time to identify the source.
Valorsul identified this visibility gap as a core operational challenge. The company's goal is straightforward: increase sorting efficiency so that more packaging exits the facility as a recoverable material, reducing what drops out to residual lines. To close that gap, the facility needed a system capable of sensing the full stream, continuously, without disrupting operations.
How Analyzer will transform Valorsul's operations
Deployed at multiple points in a facility, the Analyzer system will build a continuous picture of material flow. What's coming in, how it's moving through the sorting system, and where value is being lost.
For Valorsul, that means tracking performance across several dimensions simultaneously:
- Throughput optimisation: identifying the range of incoming material quantities that maximises yield and financial return
- Downtime reduction: detecting operational problems as they emerge, not after the fact
- PET capture rates: measuring recovery and losses on the PET line to inform decisions about line configuration and intervention
- Yield as a KPI: treating material recovery rate as a measurable, trackable metric rather than an estimate
- Capacity utilisation: making plant efficiency a quantifiable operational target
The Analyzer system also gives Valorsul a faster response capability when conditions change — whether that's a seasonal shift in incoming material composition, a machinery upgrade, or an update to regulatory requirements.
Empowering operators with the information to act
The value of waste intelligence isn't just in raw data, but in how operators act on that insight. For Diana Tomázio and her team, continuous sensing across the facility means that performance issues surface quickly, decisions are grounded in evidence, and the impact of any operational change can be measured in real time:
Access to continuous, high-resolution data will allow us to detect performance issues instantly, reduce downtime, recover more valuable materials, and improve the purity of our product streams.
This technology will help us make informed decisions, adapt to operational changes, and ultimately serve our communities more efficiently."— Diana Tomázio, Head of Innovation at Valorsul
Valorsul's deployment reflects a broader movement across European sorting infrastructure: from periodic assessment to continuous sensing, from estimation to measurement, from reactive management to data-driven operations.
For facilities working toward higher recovery rates and stronger product yields, real-time visibility into what's being recovered (and what's being lost) is a critical capability that makes improvement a repeatable operational outcome, rather than an occasional achievement.
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