Data driven solutions to predict losses and understand Alberta’s beverage container recycling ecosystem to drive higher recovery rates

May 2025 - Dec 2025*

As part of a partnership with the Alberta Beverage Container Recycling Corporation, we conduct a series of studies on Alberta’s bottle return system to gain a comprehensive understanding of it and to develop informed strategies to increase recycling rates. This work includes statistical analysis of bottle recycling data and open source demographic and economic datasets. We are currently developing algorithms to optimize and automate decision making with the aim of maximizing bottle returns while minimizing costs and environmental impact.

Top: A simple diagram of a Markov Decision Process for a model used

Bottom: Basic diagram of the bottle return supply chain

Photo sources: Cover: https://albertadepot.ca/programs/ Top: Authored by Dr. Ali Ali Hamidoğlu