Brand, model, category, store, timestamp, customer consent, and the chain of custody back to your gate. Captured at the retailer's take-back counter, exportable into the retail-client conversation. The recycler stays the recycler. The data layer is the layer above the per-kilo line.
White-label or co-marketed. Flat per-recycler fee. One agreement covers every retail client, every store, every product category. Alongside your existing operations and alongside your existing producer responsibility scheme.
In one line: price per kilo is the floor every bid eventually meets. The data layer is the ceiling the recycler's bid can reach when the next retail tender lands. The recycler remains the recycler. The data layer is the layer above the per-kilo line.
A retail-client RFP renewal is decided in the months between the formal contract events, not at the per-kilo line item itself. The continuous-evidence-flow questions the retail client's marketing and ESG teams now ask the recycler are what tip the choice: the audit-grade evidence trail under CSRD and ESRS E5 disclosure, the customer-facing story for the retail client's own marketing team, and the product-level record the recycler can carry into the next tender. The data layer at the take-back counter produces all three. The full evidence on why retail collection produces qualified feedstock at higher information density than communal collection is developed in the research artefact at /research/.
✗ Per-kilo line is the visible variable
✗ Weight report only
✗ No customer-facing artefact for the retail client
✗ No product-level audit trail
✗ Sorting cost variability absorbed at the gate
✓ Per-kilo line plus an evidence layer
✓ Brand, model, category, store, timestamp
✓ Customer-facing story the retail client can use
✓ Audit-grade chain of custody, end to end
✓ Upstream signal closes the sorting-cost gap
In one line: the data layer at the take-back counter is configurable infrastructure the recycler offers to retail clients as a value-added service. The recycler stays the seller of record. The platform is the layer the recycler points the retail client at, not a separate vendor relationship that runs around the recycler.
The data layer at the retailer's take-back counter captures brand, model, category, store, timestamp, customer consent, and the chain of custody back to the recycler's gate. The recycler chooses whether the customer-facing experience carries the recycler's brand to the retail client (white-label) or the platform's brand (co-marketed). The choice is partnership-shape, not product-shape, and is made once at the start of the partnership.
The fee is flat per recycler. One agreement covers every retail client the recycler brings to the platform, every store on those retail clients' estates, and every product category in scope. There is no per-store charge, no per-product charge, no per-retail-client charge inside the recycler's fee, and no usage-based meter that turns retail-client growth into a tax. The recycler's commercial conversation with the retail client is unencumbered. The published Netherlands pilot ran across five stores at this fee structure.
In one line: the producer responsibility scheme manages the compliance layer. The recycler operates the gate. The data layer at the take-back counter sits alongside both and produces the product-level record the compliance scheme summarises and the recycler's chain of custody confirms.
The Dutch textile EPR scheme, the European Recycling Platform, and the recycler's existing operations each operate at their own layer of the stack. None of them is replaced by what this page describes. The customer-and-product data layer captured at the point of return is complementary infrastructure that produces the evidence record the compliance scheme draws on and the recycler's gate event confirms. The recycler's existing service offer to retail clients is augmented, not substituted. Take-back programme in the glossary names the wider category; the data layer is the part of it that captures the product-level record at the customer's point of return.
Implementation does not require operational change at the recycler's gate. The retailer's take-back counter handles the customer-and-product event; the recycler's gate handles the operational event; the verified circular outcome is the join of the two. CSV export is available from day one for the recycler's existing reporting cadence, and the platform's data layer documents the API surface for retail-client CRM integration on the retailer's timeline. Nothing about the recycler's bid-side operations changes.
"Utilitarian gives us something to offer retailers that none of our competitors can match."
The published Netherlands pilot ran across five stores with FastFeetGrinded as the recycler partner. The case study covers the customer-and-product event captured at the take-back counter and the verified circular outcome confirmed at the gate. The recycler-side benefits section in the case study describes what the data layer adds to the existing FFG-retail-client relationship.
The data layer at the take-back counter is configurable to your retail-client conversation. Continue the conversation to map the partnership shape against your retail-client portfolio. Data layer for recyclers defined in the glossary. About Tim Lee, Co-Founder and CEO. The ROI calculator is the same model the recycler can run alongside a retail-client conversation.
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