B:bot

GreenBig, operating under the brand B:bot, is a French company founded in December 2017 to address inefficiencies in the plastic bottle recycling market. The venture was started by Benoît Paget, a serial entrepreneur, alongside engineers Baptiste Danezan and Fabien Rimé. Paget's journey into recycling began incidentally in 2009 with the acquisition and modernization of Canibal, a company that created collection machines for beverage containers, which exposed him to the broader environmental and industrial challenges of waste management. This experience highlighted a key market paradox: despite high consumption of plastic bottles, manufacturers struggled to source recycled material because collection and processing were more expensive than using virgin petroleum.

B:bot's core business is the design, manufacture, and deployment of smart reverse vending machines that collect, sort, and process PET plastic bottles at the point of deposit. These machines are primarily installed in high-traffic client locations like supermarkets, including major chains such as Carrefour, Auchan, and Lidl. The business model is structured to be self-financing through the sale of the processed material. By immediately shredding bottles into sorted plastic flakes, B:bot reduces waste volume by up to 90%, significantly cutting transportation costs and logistical complexity. These high-quality, pre-sorted flakes are then sold to industrial recyclers at a price reportedly two to three times higher than that of baled, unprocessed bottles, creating a profitable revenue stream that funds the entire recycling loop.

The B:bot machine itself is a sophisticated piece of equipment, using robotics and AI to manage the recycling process. When a user inserts a bottle, a 360-degree barcode scanner identifies it, while optical sensors verify its size and plastic type, rejecting ineligible items. Once accepted, the bottle is instantly shredded into flakes, which are then sorted by color into separate internal bins. This on-site processing increases the machine's capacity to approximately 3,600 bottles within a small footprint of less than one square meter. To incentivize consumer participation, the system offers a reward of €0.01 or €0.02 per bottle, which can be redeemed as a store voucher or donated to charity. The machines are connected via 4G, enabling real-time monitoring of fill levels and remote diagnostics for maintenance.

Keywords: circular economy, reverse vending machine, plastic recycling, PET flakes, waste management technology, sustainable business, GreenTech, cleantech solutions, recycling incentive programs, point-of-collection processing, automated sorting, waste volume reduction, robotics in recycling, AI recycling, sustainable infrastructure, Benoit Paget, GreenBig, environmental technology, plastic pollution solution, recycling logistics