How RTS Is Bringing AI to the Supply Chain Hiding Inside Your Trash
Written by Will Jones
Most conversations about supply chains end at delivery. Companies track procurement, inventory, shipping, fulfillment, and last-mile logistics with increasing precision, but far less attention is paid to the system that begins after products are used.
That second supply chain is less visible but just as complex. Every business, campus, and venue generates a daily stream of waste, recycling, organics, and harder-to-handle materials like e-waste and construction debris. All of it has to be collected, sorted, measured, and reported on. As much as possible has to be diverted from landfill.
For sustainability and operations teams, the challenge is not abstract. A recycling stream can be contaminated before anyone notices. A container can overflow during peak traffic. A pickup can happen when a bin is half-empty, while another area needs service sooner. A sustainability report may depend on data that is fragmented across hauler partners, sites, invoices, and manual observations.
Recycle Track Systems, better known as RTS, has built its business around that overlooked part of operations. RTS is not a hauler. It operates as a national waste broker and sustainability technology partner, coordinating with trusted hauler partners to help customers manage waste and recycling programs across locations, markets, and material streams.
Rather than approaching waste management as a fixed hauling schedule, the company treats it as a data problem, an infrastructure problem, and increasingly, an intelligence problem.
Through service coordination, analytics, sustainability reporting, and AI-powered monitoring tools, RTS helps organizations understand what happens to materials after consumption and make better decisions about cost, labor, diversion, and environmental performance. The company serves major venues, commercial real estate portfolios, universities, hospitality groups, restaurant chains, retailers, and other organizations across North America, working with customers that need more than basic collection.
For many of these organizations, waste is tied directly to sustainability goals, public reporting, operational efficiency, and brand expectations. Yet until recently, many still had limited visibility into what was happening at the container level.
At the center of the company’s technology ecosystem is Pello, its proprietary multi-sensor waste monitoring platform. RTS added Pello through its 2023 acquisition of the Canadian waste technology company RecycleSmart, expanding its ability to turn ordinary waste and recycling containers into intelligent data-collection points. Instead of relying solely on static pickup schedules or manual inspections, Pello gives organizations a clearer view into fill levels, material contamination, collection needs, usage patterns, and asset performance.
That intelligence is already being applied in complex venue environments. At Citi Field, home of the New York Mets, RTS launched Pello to support more efficient and sustainable waste operations. In a stadium environment, waste does not move on a neat schedule. A sold-out game, a concession rush, a rain delay, or the final out can quickly change container needs. Public-facing bins, back-of-house areas, cardboard, food packaging, beverage containers, recycling, and landfill-bound material all move through the property at once.
Pello gives venue teams real-time visibility into bin fullness and contamination, allowing them to prevent overflows, identify sorting issues earlier, and schedule pickups based on actual need. That matters for sustainability, but it also matters for operations and fan experience. Cleaner bins, fewer unnecessary pickups, faster issue detection, and better recycling performance all contribute to a more efficient venue.
Citi Field shows one high-profile use case, but Pello is not limited to stadiums, convention centers, or large campuses. The same technology can support smaller and mid-sized businesses, including restaurant groups, retail locations, hospitality operators, commercial kitchens, and other multi-location businesses where waste patterns vary by daypart, location, season, and customer volume. Businesses can purchase Pello through RTS as part of a broader RTS-managed waste and recycling program, or deploy it as a technology layer while continuing to work with existing waste service providers.
That flexibility is often what leads organizations to engage a waste broker in the first place: a single partner to coordinate haulers, service levels, reporting, and sustainability goals across every location, with Pello adding real-time visibility at the bin level.
The results are measurable in high-volume environments. At the Javits Center in New York, one of the busiest convention centers in the country, waste management can include trash, recycling, organics, cardboard, non-rigid plastics, e-waste, donations, construction debris, and other streams moving through a massive footprint with constantly changing event schedules.
Through its work with RTS and its partners, Javits has made measurable progress, including reducing overall trash tonnage by 15% from 2022 to 2024, increasing diverted organics by 12%, and recovering more than 8 tons of non-rigid plastic from the trash stream for downcycling into decking material.
For Ross Guberman, SVP of Sustainability at RTS, results like these start with better information. "The biggest opportunity is moving from estimates to evidence," Guberman said. "In one campus deployment, our sensors found bins averaging 48 percent full at pickup. That customer had been paying to haul air. When teams can see fullness, contamination, and service needs that clearly, sustainability stops being something that shows up in a report after the fact. It becomes part of how the operation runs every day."
For Greg Lettieri, co-founder and CEO of RTS, the operational gains point to a larger shift in what businesses are expected to prove — a standard RTS applies to itself, publishing its own diversion results, emissions work, and commitments in its Sustainability Snapshot.
"For years, a company could say its waste was handled and that was the end of the conversation," Lettieri said. "That conversation is over. Customers, regulators, and investors want to see the material flows. We put our own numbers on paper because we shouldn't ask clients for a level of transparency we won't provide ourselves. The companies that can show real data against their commitments are the ones that will earn trust and set the standard."
The shift is significant because waste management has historically been reactive. Containers are often serviced because a calendar says they should be, not because the material inside them actually requires collection.
A bin may be half-empty, overflowing, contaminated, or pose a potential hazard, but without better data, facilities teams are left to make decisions based on routine inspections, complaints, visual checks, or after-the-fact reporting.
Pello changes that relationship by moving waste collection closer to waste intelligence. When containers become sources of real-time information, organizations can better understand how materials move through a property, which areas generate the most volume, where contamination is occurring, and when service is actually needed.
That information can help reduce unnecessary pickups, improve labor allocation, support diversion goals, and give sustainability leaders stronger data for internal and external reporting.
That is where AI becomes especially relevant. Much of the current conversation around artificial intelligence focuses on marketing, customer service, software development, or front-end logistics. RTS represents a different application, one rooted in physical operations.
Waste and recycling systems generate large amounts of information, but much of that information has historically been fragmented, manual, or difficult to act on. By combining sensor data, customer workflows, service records, collection activity, hauler partner coordination, and sustainability reporting, RTS is helping turn a largely invisible operational function into a measurable business system.
The implications extend beyond individual bins. As commercial buildings, campuses, stadiums, entertainment venues, restaurants, retailers, and municipalities become more connected, waste infrastructure is becoming part of the broader smart building and smart city conversation.
Energy use, occupancy, HVAC, security, and maintenance have all become more data-driven over the past decade. Waste has often lagged behind despite being one of the most visible and persistent operational challenges for large properties and multi-location businesses.
Closing that gap matters because the future of sustainability will depend as much on better visibility into everyday systems as on major climate pledges or high-profile clean technology investments.
For many organizations, progress starts with more practical questions: Which materials are being generated? Where are they going? Which streams are being contaminated? Which services are being used unnecessarily? Which locations need more attention, and which need less?
RTS has built its platform around answering those questions. In doing so, the company is helping redefine waste brokerage and waste management as a form of infrastructure intelligence, where better data at the bin level can support smarter decisions across an entire organization. The supply chain hidden inside trash has always existed. RTS is making it visible.
