New York's organic waste is a grid
waiting to be connected.

Every day, farms and food businesses across the state generate thousands of tons of manure, food scraps, whey, and spoiled grain. Most of it decomposes into methane in landfills instead of reaching a digester, composter, animal-feed buyer, or food bank. Tangerine is the data layer and marketplace that connects producers, haulers, and processors, so waste finds its highest use instead of the nearest dumpster.

We're onboarding our first pilot partners in the Hudson Valley. Sign up and we'll reach out personally.

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The problem

A broken market, hiding in plain sight

Circular waste management fails for structural reasons, not technical ones. The processing capacity exists. The market connecting it to supply doesn't.

Invisible supply

Producers don't know who wants their waste, and simply throw it out, often in violation of the law. Not because there's no demand, but because they can't see it, don't know their waste has value, and don't want to deal with sorting it themselves. In NYC, that invisibility runs both ways: no public list even exists yet of which businesses are covered.

Idle capacity

Digesters, composters, and depackaging facilities that do exist run under capacity. Feedstock arrives unpredictably, in the wrong mix, from a handful of nearby sources, leaving real processing capacity stranded while nearby producers still landfill.

Contamination kills yield

Digestion and composting need clean, well-characterized feedstock. Food scraps arrive mixed with plastic and cardboard packaging; manure loads vary in carbon-to-nitrogen ratio. Mixed or contaminated loads either get rejected at the gate or quietly wreck a facility's output.

The solution

Two layers: see the waste, and trust it

Tangerine starts as software: a shared data layer and marketplace for a market that has never had one, tuned to how each player (producer, hauler, processor, or food bank) actually works. Machine vision keeps that data clean and trustworthy as the platform matures.

Layer 1 · see the product below

The waste data layer & marketplace

A live map of what's being produced where, when, and how much of it, matched against processor capacity and hauler availability, with a view tuned to whichever side of the transaction you're on.

  • Producers list waste streams as they're generated, with automated compliance tracking
  • Haulers see nearby loads to bid on and get routed to maximize loads per mile
  • Processors publish live intake capacity and buy on the open market
  • Regulators, NGOs, and investors see diversion rates and capacity gaps in real time
Layer 2 · the moat

AI vision classification

Camera systems placed upstream (where waste is first produced and at transfer points to trucks and facilities) that classify streams and flag packaging contamination automatically, so the data layer stays clean without adding a pain point for producers.

  • Detection models fine-tuned on organic waste and packaging contamination
  • Contamination flagged before a load ships, not after it's rejected at the gate
  • Feedstock composition estimated automatically for C:N balancing and compliance records
  • Built on our team's production experience running industrial CV pipelines
Product

One platform, tuned to who you are

Tell Tangerine what your organization does (produce, haul, process, redistribute, or oversee organic material, in any combination) and the platform builds itself around that: the right tabs, the right questions, the right connections, on top of one shared, live map of the waste stream across New York. No account needed to look around.

Producer

Farms and food businesses log waste effortlessly, track compliance deadlines, and find haulers or buyers nearby.

Hauler

Bid on nearby loads, get optimized routes, and confirm pickups with a tap instead of a paper receipt.

Processor

Digesters and composters see live intake capacity, buy supply on the open market, and track supplier quality over time.

Food bank

See surplus food nearby before it's recycled, and request pickup directly from producers.

Regulator & NGO / investor

Track diversion rates, compliance status, and capacity gaps across the whole state in real time.

Launch the platform No signup: a two-minute onboarding, then explore. Flip on demo data to see the platform fully populated.
Why now

Recent regulation and the grid are both pulling

1

Two laws, two clocks, both tightening

Statewide (NYC exempt): the Food Donation & Food Scraps Recycling Law covers businesses generating 2 tons/week today, dropping to 1 ton/week on Jan 1, 2027 and 0.5 tons/week on Jan 1, 2029, and only if a recycler is within 25 miles now, expanding to 50 miles from 2027. In NYC, Local Law 146 (modernized by Int. 31, effective July 2026) runs on its own track: DSNY must determine by Dec 1, 2026 whether the city has enough processing capacity at competitive prices, which then pulls newly designated businesses into compliance within six months. Unlike the state, DSNY doesn't yet publish which businesses that covers: exactly the visibility gap Tangerine's data layer fills.

2

The processing side needs the same data

Under the CLCPA, New York is committed to 70% renewable electricity by 2030, and digesters and composters across the state (from livestock AD facilities upstate to WM's Varick Avenue depackaging plant in Brooklyn) run under capacity for lack of visibility into nearby supply, not lack of demand. Matching that idle capacity to newly regulated producers is the other half of the same market failure.

3

Vision AI got cheap enough

Classifying messy industrial material streams with cameras was research five years ago. Today it's a deployable pipeline our team has already run in production livestock environments. We'll use the same playbook, pointed at waste and packaging contamination.

About us

Why we're building Tangerine

We met at a climate hackathon at the Climate Imaginarium on Governors Island, and bonded over the same conviction: the climate transition needs working markets as much as it needs new technology. Waste-to-energy is a solved engineering problem stuck behind an unsolved information problem.

Portrait of Zoe Liu

Zoe Liu

Co-founder · Climate & Policy

Zoe is completing her master's in Environmental Science & Policy at Columbia University, specializing in waste-to-energy research and policy. She has written research papers based on international fieldwork analyzing agribusiness supply chains, and is currently project manager of a graduate workshop conducting policy research on hydroelectricity.

She leads Tangerine's regulatory strategy, biomass supply-chain research, and stakeholder outreach.

Portrait of Tristan Spratt

Tristan Spratt

Co-founder · Technology

Tristan is a founding engineer at Prophet AI, a Greentown Labs agri-tech startup using computer vision to monitor poultry health and prevent 2 MMT of CO₂ emissions annually. He built the company's entire vision pipeline — camera installation, annotation and training infrastructure, edge deployment, and dashboards used by two of the largest US poultry producers.

Tangerine uses the same stack: cameras in dirty industrial settings and edge inference, but pointed at waste.

Get in touch

If you produce organic byproducts in New York, haul them, or turn them into energy, we want to talk to you.

Talk to the founders

Join the pilot

We're onboarding a first group of New York organizations. Tell us who you are and one of the founders will get in touch to set you up.