“We live in a world that needs big transformation. We urgently need to accelerate the circular economy and make more efficient use of resources – opportunities that TOMRA’s solutions can help address. TOMRA has a fifty-year heritage of innovation and impact, with the proven solutions our customers – and the planet – really need. These past fifty years have prepared us to rise to the most pressing challenge of our time: reinventing the way the world manages waste. We strive to lead the resource revolution, and our team of resource revolutionaries around the world are up to the challenge.” - Tove Andersen, President & CEO of TOMRA.
A world that needs sustainable solutions
Today, TOMRA has more than 100,000 installations in over 80 markets, with over 4600 employees across the company worldwide. TOMRA Collection, which develops reverse vending machines to enable beverage container recycling, captures over 40 billion drink containers each year. Its reverse vending machines enable 4.5 million tons in avoided carbon emissions each year.
To fight plastic waste, TOMRA has an ambition to enable 40% of plastic packaging produced globally to be collected for recycling by 2030. Currently, only 14% of all the world’s plastic packaging is captured for recycling, with just 2% recycled in a “closed loop” (recycled for the same purpose, without being downgraded to lower quality plastic).
The company has also set the goal to collect 500 billion containers annually for Clean Loop Recycling, the company’s version of closed-loop recycling, so they can become new bottles and cans, again and again. This reduces reliance on raw materials in the production of new containers, and ensures fewer containers end up in our streets, oceans and landfills.
“TOMRA today is more relevant than ever. Our work to enable a world without waste is at the heart of enormous challenges in sustainability impacting the entire globe – such as the need to combat climate change, plastic pollution and food waste, and drive a circular economy. TOMRA Collection provides the technology to enable these results, but the true impact of this recycling comes from the efforts of retailers, recycling centers and consumers around the world. We thank them all for making this milestone anniversary possible, and we look forward to working together on these ambitious goals.” - Harald Henriksen, EVP & Head of TOMRA Collection.
Garage start-up to industry leader in sustainability solutions
TOMRA was founded in Norway on April 1, 1972 by brothers Petter and Tore Planke. After seeing a local grocer struggle with the manual collection of empty bottles in their store, which consumers returned for reuse, the brothers developed the first fully-automated reverse vending machine in their family’s garage. This invention was quickly embraced by retailers and spawned an entire industry for efficiently handling the return and recycling of deposit beverage containers, also setting TOMRA as an early pioneer in the green-tech wave.
TOMRA has continued to innovate in the reverse vending space. The most recent development saw the launch of TOMRA R1, a “multi-feed” solution that enables recyclers to pour over 100 containers into the machine at once, rather than inserting them one by one. TOMRA has also integrated the Internet of Things and big data to enable container recycling to go digital, with options for paperless refund vouchers, analytics for stores on their shoppers' return patterns, a retailer app with notifications about machine status, and a consumer app with functionalities for maps, donation and gamification of container returns.
