TOMRA Systems ASA

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• Did you know2024

  TOMRA's food sorting machines — which use near-infrared (NIR) hyperspectral cameras to detect defective potatoes in a French fry production line (green, diseased, excessively large, bruised) by their spectral signature — are the same NIR spectral imaging platform as their recycling sorting machines that separate PET plastic from HDPE plastic from PVC plastic in Material Recovery Facilities. The NIR reflectance signature of a green potato and a PVC plastic bottle are both detected by the same InGaAs (indium gallium arsenide) camera arrays measuring reflected light at 1000-1800nm wavelengths. A shortage of InGaAs photodetector arrays (produced primarily by Hamamatsu in Japan and Sensors Unlimited/UTC in the US for military night-vision applications) would simultaneously affect TOMRA's food safety sorting capacity (potato/nut/grain defect detection) and plastic waste recycling purity — both supply chains depending on the same semiconductor detector technology that was originally developed for military infrared surveillance.

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• Concentration2024

  TOMRA operates more than 75,000 reverse vending machines across 60+ countries and processes roughly 45 billion returned beverage containers per year — making TOMRA the world's de facto closed-loop tracking system for beverage container flows. In every market with a container deposit scheme (Norway, Germany, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, most US states, Australia, and growing), the data on which brands, SKUs, and container types are returned, at what rate, and at which retail locations flows through TOMRA's network. A Norwegian company's installed base of return machines has accumulated the world's largest proprietary dataset on beverage consumption patterns and container recovery rates — data that the beverage industry (Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Heineken, Carlsberg) pays to access for ESG reporting and circular economy compliance. TOMRA's RVM network is simultaneously beverage return infrastructure and a global consumption analytics platform that operates under a single private Norwegian company.

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• Origin2024

  TOMRA was founded in 1972 in Asker, Norway by Tore Planke and brothers Petter and Gunnar Planke. Their founding innovation was the first automated bottle deposit return machine — installed in a single Norwegian grocery store in 1972, shortly after Norway introduced its first plastic bottle deposit laws. The original insight was simple: Norway had a beverage container deposit system that required manual counting and sorting of returned bottles, which was labor-intensive. A machine that could automatically accept, identify, count, and credit deposits would be more efficient. TOMRA's reverse vending machine industrialized container deposit return and enabled Norway to achieve the world's highest beverage container recovery rates (glass, plastic, aluminum). The company that began as a single machine in an Asker grocery store in 1972 now operates 75,000+ machines across 60 countries and processes roughly 45 billion containers per year — handling more container transactions globally than most national postal services handle mail.

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