William Neil: Using AI To Improve Recycling

Neil’s early life gave him the ingredients — the passion, the experience, the technical knowledge, and the courage — to start a business on his own. When he was a ten-year-old living in Pasadena, he watched his mother start a photographic safari business in Botswana. He spent summers and holidays in the bush, literally, where the family initially had no electric power but plenty of energy for exploring. He thinks that living among and learning from the animals there provided him with an appreciation for nature and the sense of stewardship that led him to build his recycling app.

During those days in Africa, Neil also learned how to make do with what tools were available as he helped build and fix things. Sometimes, he said, if you needed a hammer that you didn’t have access to, you just found something else that could do the job. That kind of adaptability and the need to make things work with the tools available prepared him for his work at First Republic.

Back in Pasadena during the 1980s, the Neil family acquired one of the early personal computers, giving the teenage Neil another direction for his explorations. He went on to study computer information systems in college, graduating from Northern Arizona University’s business school in 1995 with a BS in CIS. After six years and three jobs developing his skills in data architecture, business intelligence, and database marketing, he arrived at First Republic.

At First Republic, Neil says, “Solving customer problems was inbred in everyone who worked there. But there was no way we were going to create a workflow of customer questions because every customer was considered unique. So, I really had to be kind of inventive about how to solve problems.”

The demands of his work at the bank further honed Neil’s ability to adapt to a dynamic set of customer needs and sharpened the technical skills he needed to serve them. In meeting the demands of so many customers, he learned that delivering results mattered more than building the perfect system — a valuable lesson for getting EarthSort to market.

EarthSort, the iPhone app, didn’t take long to build. Version 1.0 went live in the Apple App Store in September 2025, but all it did was tell you whether something could be recycled or tossed in the trash, according to a default set of rules.

A few friends downloaded it and seemed to like it, but Neil was disappointed and somewhat disillusioned. He briefly forgot the lesson he learned at First Republic — that his job wasn’t to “have the perfect data system” but to serve his customers.

“It wasn’t perfect,” he says today, “and it wasn’t local. And honestly, I was like, great, this is kind of working. It’s cool. What am I gonna do with it?”

Unsure about EarthSort the app and EarthSort the business, Neil retreated into full nerd mode with a second start-up: QCheck.ai, an online tool that could help software developers find bugs in their code in minutes rather than weeks — a boon in an industry permeated by the need for speed. His work on QCheck, however, came to a quick stop when he realized there were other, multi-billion-dollar companies already in the market with tools that had already solved the problem his app addressed.

He circled back to EarthSort “with fresh eyes and far more conviction.” He was re-energized by improvements in AI technology and the recognition that new laws relating to Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) and new efforts at establishing a circular economy were creating new opportunities for both his app and his business.

Neil began iterating new versions of the app, adding localization with version 2.0. When a user opens the app, the app pulls up the local rules and regulations governing recycling in that community. If the community’s rules are not already in the EarthSort database, the app’s AI quickly finds the rules and automatically organizes and adds them to the database. With improved ability to distinguish objects in photographs, the AI is now able to use those local rules more accurately.

With his diverse customer base in mind, Neil added Spanish and Simplified Chinese in April 2026, followed by an Android version. The August 2026 release (v.2.6) expanded the app’s explanations of why an item goes in a particular bin and pointed users to alternatives, such as taking soft plastics, including grocery bags, back to the supermarket.

For future releases, Neil is looking beyond his original objective of improving recycling rates. Circularity, the idea that our economy should mirror nature’s efficiency in turning “waste” into fertilizer for new growth, represents a paradigm shift that Neil believes his app can help facilitate. He envisions expanding the app beyond the binary “recycle or trash?” to include other options, such as “compost, return, repair, or reuse”, that can further reduce or eliminate the one billion tons of waste produced in the US each year.

Many communities have made a big push to compost food waste and packaging in the last few years as a means of reducing methane gas. Greasy pizza boxes and paper coffee cups can be composted rather than trashed or recycled in some places. Neil likes to point out that in the Bay Area where he lives, “the paper coffee cup is recycled in San Francisco, composted in San Mateo, and trashed in Oakland.”

“Return”, of course, applies to bottles and cans in those states where customers pay a deposit on each bottle and can purchased. Those deposits can be collected when the empties are returned.

“Reuse” refers to packaging and to items like clothing, bicycles, even some electronics that can be resold or donated. There are a growing number of resellers on- and offline, as well as platforms that bring sellers and donors together with resellers and end users.

As Neil iterates further, the app might one day further close the circle by telling you where you can dispose of your recycling, repair an item such as a pair of shoes, or sell or donate your reusable goods.

EarthSort, at this point, is still a one-person operation. Before he can build the teams needed to accelerate app development and fully penetrate potential markets, Neil needs funding. He sees the growth of EPR as a potential source.

The Product Stewardship Institute, which advocates that producers — not taxpayers — bear the costs of their products’ end of life, says there are now 150 EPR laws in 34 states and the District of Columbia. These laws cover 22 product categories from batteries, carpet, and electronics to solar panels, textiles, and tires. Well-crafted EPR laws substantially increase recycling rates by requiring that producers pay the costs of collecting, sorting and recycling their packaging and paper products at the end of their life.

According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which seeks to accelerate the transition to a circular economy in response to the triple threat of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution, “Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is the only proven and likely way” to generate ongoing, sustainable, and significant reductions in manufactured waste.

As new EPR laws come online, Neil thinks there will be funding for public education about the new laws — exactly what his app delivers. Under California’s new EPR law, SB 54, for which key obligations begin on January 1, 2027, the state will collect from producers a mandated $500 million annually for 10 years. Neil reasons that some of that money will go to informing the public about the new law and what’s to be done with the range of products it covers.

To make sure EarthSort is top of mind when decisions are made about disbursing those funds, Neil has had a presence as a panelist and exhibitor at conferences such as the recently concluded Climate Week in New York City and the Solid Waste Association of North America meeting in Long Beach. He is also co-lead of the Circular Economy Cluster at 9Zero, a networking group aimed at accelerating climate solutions.

Early this year, Neil wrote in a post on LinkedIn, “What’s excited me most is seeing how these forces, local reality and EPR, create space for better tools, clearer guidance, and less confusion for residents. That’s where EarthSort fits, and why I’m more energized about this work now than at any point over the last year.”