Kristin Myers: And joining us now at the desk is Greg Lettieri, co-founder and CEO of Recycle Track Systems, or RTS. Greg, thanks so much for joining us today. So as I just mentioned, Raising Cane’s renewed this deal across nearly 1,000 locations, 1,000 restaurants. So talk to us, for those that aren’t familiar with RTS, because we talked a lot about trash, right, and the waste business, but what is it exactly that RTS does? And what does this deal with Raising Cane’s cover?
Greg Lettieri: Yeah, absolutely. So again, thanks for having me. So when we first, actually, CNBC coined us the Uber for Trash, which we’re not really like that anymore. But the essence of it was it’s an asset-light business. So we don’t physically own the trucks that operate. We’ve done deals with over 1,000 waste companies across North America, and we’re servicing, as you mentioned, 20,000 locations using third-party vehicles. And the secret sauce for us right now is we built an IoT sensor called Pello that sits within the dumpster. So that gives us the
Kristin Myers: What does IoT stand for?
Greg Lettieri: Internet of Things.
Kristin Myers: Okay.
Greg Lettieri: So it’s a sensor-based device that gives us a signal inside the dumpster. And what the signal does is it tells us how full the container is and what material is going inside of it, and also if there’s, like, a missed pickup. So as you’re managing third-party vehicles, missed pickups is one of the kind of largest issues that we have to deal with. And understanding the fullness of the container is very important as well, because a lot of these schedules have been for 35, 40, 50 years. You’re picked up three days a week or five days a week. And it’s like, is that necessary? Right? So our goal is to reduce truck traffic, reduce miles traveled, and have the customer understand this is the service that we need, and do dynamic routing based on the sensor reading, the IoT sensor reading.
Kristin Myers: Okay. So it’s all coming together because you came from a background in technology at Bank of America, and your co-founder came from a waste hauling background. And so what is it about the garbage business that you saw that you think that everyone else was missing? Was it the fact that there was that level of inefficiency inside the bins, that sort of fixed schedule of pickups?
Greg Lettieri: I love the opportunity. It is an antiquated business. We built an internal platform that reads all the invoices and data for our sustainability reporting. Some of this data that still comes over to us is handwritten on notes, actual postcards that come in the mail with invoices and pricing. So it’s quite antiquated. And I think the opportunity is to digitize it, which we’ve done. And I think the opportunity is amazing. One of the things that we kind of went through when I went through my VC raising capital back in 2017 is, like, oh, you don’t have another app or another SaaS product. It’s a service-based business in an industry where it’s required. And for us as a technology company, you’re able to find customers that need waste removal services and they want to do it in a better, more efficient and less expensive way. And that’s really what we’ve built. So we’re not having to convince people that they need to have waste removal. That already exists. Right? We just need to show them that you can do it in a better, more, you know, less expensive way. Because I think when most people think about AI and the industries that are not ever going to be touched, they think about those service-based industries, they think about plumbing, and they think about waste management.
Kristin Myers: Yeah. So I’m curious to know, just what was it that made you say, yeah, this industry, which hasn’t changed forever, really? I can’t really think of what much has changed inside of the industry.
Greg Lettieri: This is a space that is ripe for opportunity to bring on AI and to bring on automation. The industry is massive. So you’ve got multiple publicly traded companies on the New York Stock Exchange today with market caps of 30, 40, 50 billion plus dollars. They say the target addressable market is in the trillions on a global level. I don’t know if that’s validated or not, but it is big, right? And everybody needs it, from your house to your office to the sports stadiums that we service to college campuses. And they want to do it better. They want to make sure they’re recycling material better. So the opportunity sits there. And that’s kind of why we started the business. It’s been over ten years now. That opportunity is the same as it was ten years ago. It’s still big, and AI will disrupt it, and we’re using it to disrupt this industry. Now, disruption is a little different because it is a physical-based service. So you do have to have a physical pickup. But how the truck gets there today, is it getting there in an efficient manner? What material are you picking up? Where does that material go if it’s recycled materials or cardboard? Wood, steel? We do a lot of these materials, and you want to make sure they’re going to the right facility. And there’s pretty much like a certification process in our reporting that says this was recycled. Because the question I always get asked is, how do I know it was recycled when I throw it out? Well, we’ve built a certification process to be able to tell you that through dump slips and through the end-party destinations of actually the facility that it goes to.
Kristin Myers: I was going to say, let’s dive into this a little bit more, what pieces the AI is doing. And let’s start from actually even just the sensors inside of the dumpsters themselves. Now, I hear that, and I just think of, you know, like your washing machine. Right? The sensor that’s in that tells, at least the new ones now, right? So at least I dive into that. Is it just saying how full it is, or what is it that Pello is doing?
Greg Lettieri: [unclear: “This side of the sensor”] is about this large. It’s got three sensors on it and a camera. So the camera is taking a photo and it’s telling you what’s inside of it. So the number one use case, Amazon packages, right? The amount of cardboard that we all deal with on an individual basis or a store basis, cardboard being thrown in the trash. So there’s a photo taken, automatically sent to the facilities team saying you’re throwing recycling into the garbage. Go pull that out. Right? That’s an automatic notification. On the opposite side is trash being thrown into the recycling, automatic notification that you’re contaminating the loads. Then there’s a sensor component that tells us how full the container is. So what happens is a lot of these containers, sometimes they’re picked up half full, 20% full, sometimes they’re 100% full. When they’re 20 to 50% full, we want to not service that. So it’s very expensive to send a truck to pick up these things. In New York City alone, you’re burning, like, pretty much every gallon of gas. [unclear: “Diesel fuel is like 2 to 3 miles traveled”] for these large-size trucks. So if you think about diesel at over $6 right now, that is cost savings for your trucking companies. So it’s having the full kind of understanding of smart cities, of understanding how things should be serviced, what containers should be serviced, how quickly they should be serviced and what type of material is in it, and then giving the clients and our trucking operation kind of this full visibility in a dashboard and an AI mode to be able to make these decisions in real time.
Kristin Myers: And where and when does the agentic AI step in? Once that sensor is, you know, reading the bin, where does AI take
Greg Lettieri: So there’s multiple forms. We have agentic AI in multiple forms of the business. On the sensor side, there is a full real-time monitoring tool that is reading all of those measurements that I just went over, and it’s providing real-time data to our system. One of the other ones for us is, they’re on battery. These sensors are on battery. They last about three years, so sometimes they need to be replaced. So that is an automatic AI triage. When the battery is getting to end of life, there is an automatic ticket that is opened. It’s dispatched to a local company to replace the battery. That is 100% AI. There is no human interaction in that transaction. One of the other things that we’ve built is a billing platform. We receive a lot of invoices and data from a thousand third-party companies. Very hard. They’re all different formats. Very hard to read. That all comes into a central database. AI reads it, matches it against our contract and work orders. So it validates pricing on our business. We’ve got at least $1 million plus of overcharges on a yearly basis that the system is now finding and dealing with.
Kristin Myers: Where is the human in the line? Where does the human stand? [unclear: “That’s all.”]
Greg Lettieri: Yeah. So the human interaction is with the account management team and the service team. So all of the agentic AI workflow right now is going to a human for submission and for approval. So we launched our system very recently from the full agentic AI platform, and all of the work is still monitored and supported by the team.
Kristin Myers: Okay. So I’m curious to know how much, dollar-wise. I know you just mentioned $1 million of overcharges that AI was able to spot. Is that the only cost savings? What can you tell me? I know you mentioned a little bit about the fuel from the trucks, but if you could also run into some other extra expenses and efficiencies that your clients [unclear].
Greg Lettieri: So on the customer level, we see cost savings roughly about 10 to 20% on their monthly spend.
Kristin Myers: Okay.
Greg Lettieri: So it’s pretty significant. A sports stadium that we may serve, as a Major League Baseball team, that could be half a million to $1 million a year in spend. So 10 to 20% does add up. But the efficiency is also there, too, is knowing that your truck has arrived, knowing when it’s going to arrive, knowing that it went to the proper destination. A lot of this industry has been built over the telephone or radio. So we’ve eliminated that. You log into your portal, you’re able to see everything that’s going on, right in front of you from your facilities management perspective. It’s been incredible.
Kristin Myers: I, really quickly before we head over to a break, I’m curious to know, because you guys are in 20,000 locations across the United States, well, across North America. [unclear: “Actually, can you say United States?”] What does the next leg of growth look like for you guys?
Greg Lettieri: There’s a lot more to grow. So we’ve done some M&A activity. We got into Canada through an acquisition, so that added close to about 3,500 locations. So more M&A. We are doing quite well as a business, and organic growth. So the organic growth continues. So we’ve closed some really nice customers in the last few months. We mentioned the Raising Cane’s announcement, which is one of the fastest-growing restaurant chains in the country. So it’s more of that and just trying to control as many sites as we can, because that gets us scale in size to be able to get rates down and make sure we’re more efficient for our customers.
Kristin Myers: Okay. So I’ve been absolutely fascinated in this whole conversation. Now, you just heard the comparison with Waste Management. They own the trucks. They own the landfills. Now, you mostly don’t. I’m curious to know whether being asset-light in a world that usually values the hard assets, yeah, if you view that as an advantage, or is that a vulnerability at all?
Greg Lettieri: For us, it’s an advantage. It could be a vulnerability. I think we’ve gotten rid of that vulnerability. But it is an advantage. And I think the easiest thing for somebody to understand, if I get a new customer in a market and I don’t have physical assets and labor, I can service that customer through my third-party network. So if you think about it from a cost perspective or a capital perspective, I’m able to grow as a traditional tech company just by taking on that relationship, installing our sensor and servicing that customer without the truck, the insurance, the labor and all the, you know, the things that come with that.
Kristin Myers: Now, when it comes to trash pickup, even though it’s antiquated, the United States has done a fairly good job of picking up its trash, taking it to a landfill. The one thing that the United States has not been great at is recycling. So much recycling still ends up in a landfill. Why has that been so hard to fix? And how do you view RTS as being the solution to that?
Greg Lettieri: Yeah, it’s broken in a sense. I think for us, we focus on a few different pieces of it. One is making sure what we recycle is actually recycled. Food waste is a big piece of recycling that I think a lot of people don’t really touch. Some municipalities, New York City, San Francisco, have implemented food waste recycling, but across the country it’s really not there and the infrastructure isn’t there. We focus on that a lot and building out that infrastructure. Food waste is about 35% of the waste stream, if you think about it. So it is big. It creates methane. And the thing about food waste compared to plastic, people always ask me about plastic bottles. Plastics are hard because sometimes they’re dirty. Sometimes it’s different types of plastic. Food waste, you can understand. You understand what food scraps are. You understand what food waste is. And sports stadiums, hotels, conference centers, there is a ton of food waste, and no pun intended, but there’s a ton of material that you can recycle, and we try to track that for our clients. And yeah, we don’t do what, like, my brother does in Europe, where he’s scraping all the things off the plates into its own separate food waste bin.
Kristin Myers: Okay. So let’s talk about the expansion piece. We’re just chatting about that over the break. So here in New York City, the city is rebuilding how business is and how trash is getting picked up. I think we all remember that study that was done about garbage bins in New York City. Now RTS is one of the contracted haulers. Talk to us about what’s changing for businesses, at least here in New York, and are you seeing that in other large municipalities across the country?
Greg Lettieri: It’s called commercial waste zones in New York, and anyone that owns a local business in New York is going through this today. It’s a complete overhaul from an open market to what I would call an RFP bid. So it selected roughly about seven vendors. There were five citywide contracts that were granted. We were fortunate to win one of those. So that means we can service all five boroughs. And you mentioned hauler. So we did win that contract as a hauler. A hauler would be a trucking provider. We do not have trucks. We are the only company in New York City that is operating in a subcontracting model, and we’re doing that across multiple zones, including the citywide contract. So it’s been an incredible ride for us. We’re rolling out Upper Manhattan right now, which is kind of north of 125th Street, on the west side. And we’ve also won Queens South, we’ve won the Bronx West, and hopefully there are some more opportunities for us as well.
Kristin Myers: Okay. Now, the city says only about 20% of what it collected under the new zones last year was recycled or composted. They’ve said that that number is too low. What do you think would change that number?
Greg Lettieri: I think that number is probably lower.
Kristin Myers: Oh, wow.
Greg Lettieri: Than that on the residential side. I think that might be fairly accurate. On the commercial side, it’s even lower. What was the question?
Kristin Myers: Well, what would change that number? What would you think would increase that number?
Greg Lettieri: Well, we’re changing it. You have to be able to track it, and you have to be able to understand where it’s going, and you need visibility. So the sensor gives us visibility through the camera to actually say this was recycled or it wasn’t. If you continue to go through the old ways, which, as you put it in front of your curb and you wish, wishful recycling, we joke around at the office, then that’s what’s going to happen. You wish, and maybe it goes there. Maybe it does. It needs to be tracked. It’s 2026. We have a data set that allows us to track it, and that’s what we’ve built and that’s what we’ve implemented.
Kristin Myers: Okay. So let’s talk about some more of the expansion stuff. I want to first start at least here at home in the United States. You already have contracts with some pretty big teams. You mentioned, I think it was the Nets and the Mets. I wasn’t expecting such rhyme. But the Nets and the Mets, is this something that you’re hearing, a lot of stadiums and sports teams are interested in this type of?
Greg Lettieri: Yeah, we also have the Kansas City Royals, the Baltimore Ravens. I’m actually going to the Monday Night Football game to celebrate the partnership there. So we love the sports engagements. What it gives us is branding recognition. It also gives us a lot of credibility, and as a startup you want to have credibility. It’s been great for us, especially in a local market. You mentioned the New York Mets. So we’re in New York. If I’m meeting a customer, we tell them we’ve got the Mets. 50% of the time they’re a Mets or Yankees fan. So sometimes it works in our favor. If they’re a Yankees fan, they at least know the Mets and you’re able to kind of engage at that level. And it provides a lot of trust and credibility. And working with these sports teams has been great. And they’re the first adopters on the technology. So we do have our sensors at the Kansas City Royals. We do have them at the Baltimore Ravens. And we do have them at the New York Mets as well.
Kristin Myers: So I’m going to put you on the spot, on live television, about when you’re going to compete with Waste Management’s Open and do an RTS Open in golf or in another sport?
Greg Lettieri: [unclear: “Or in another sport that”] you might have to come back to me on that one in a few years. I don’t think our board would appreciate the spend on the golf outing. We might want to start a little smaller, maybe pickleball or something.
Kristin Myers: We can do that. That is apparently all the rage. Talk to me about expansion outside of the United States right now. How is that looking inside of Canada, and is there interest in going even further afield?
Greg Lettieri: Canada, we love the Canadian market. The team we have there is outstanding. We just like that we are the leader there from a tech and sustainability perspective, and we’re going to continue to invest in Canada. When you think post-Canada, like go into Europe or Asia, it gets back to the target addressable market in the US is really big. My goal is to get it right here and be the leading player, which really we are today, but even on a larger scale, maybe traded one day on the New York Stock Exchange. But we’ve got a lot to get done in the US before we need to think about going internationally, but the opportunities are there. I think Europe and Asia, really anywhere, can be a customer for us in this asset-light model. But again, there’s enough to accomplish here.
Kristin Myers: So I want to pick up on that as our last question to you. You mentioned possibly going public. Is that the ultimate goal, to go public and to ring the bell here?
Greg Lettieri: You know, I worked on the stock exchange when I was like 19 years old. I was a runner. I went to high school at Xavier High School on 16th Street. That would be a dream come true. There’s a lot that has to line up for that to actually happen, and there’s a lot of compliance that comes with being a public company. But if that could happen, that would be a dream come true, for sure.
Kristin Myers: All right. We’re going to have to leave that there. Greg Lettieri, co-founder and CEO of Recycle Track Systems. Thank you so much for joining us today.
