TOMRA: Closing the Loop

In 1971, a grocery store owner outside Oslo complained to a sales representative about his empty bottle problem. Months later, the solution to that complaint became TOMRA. More than fifty years on, TOMRA has grown into the world's leading provider of resource optimization technology: the infrastructure behind deposit return systems on six continents, the sorting machines inside the largest recycling facilities, and the grading systems that process the majority of the world's french fries. What started as a machine for one local store now sits at the center of the circular economy.

The infrastructure of circularity

For decades, waste was largely treated as the end of a product's life cycle. Increasingly, however, governments, industries, and consumers are approaching materials differently, as resources to recover, sort, and return into circulation. That shift has created entirely new layers of infrastructure around collection, recycling, and resource optimization.

TOMRA has spent more than fifty years building technology at the center of that transition. What began with reverse vending machines (RVM) for returned beverage containers has expanded into a global business built around different aspects of the circular economy. Today, the company's systems are used to identify, sort, grade, and recover everything from plastic bottles and aluminum cans to industrial waste streams, potatoes, and blueberries.

Across the TOMRA group, however, the company has largely expanded through the same underlying logic: solve a practical problem, build technology around it, and adapt it market by market over time.

Before writing this article, we had the opportunity to sit down with TOMRA CEO Tove Andersen to discuss the company's history, culture, and the road ahead. Throughout our conversation, TOMRA's operational focus turned us back to core themes of decentralization, adaptability, and maintaining the entrepreneurial mindset that has shaped TOMRA since its founding in 1972. Reflecting on TOMRA's culture, Andersen said: “The person closest to the problem is typically best at solving it.”

In many ways, that philosophy and how it scales in an organization of over 5,000 employees explains both how TOMRA operates today across its global divisions and the mindset that has shaped its history. Coincidentally, it also captures how the company began more than fifty years ago.

Solving a local problem

The history of TOMRA begins with two brothers, Tore and Petter Planke, from Asker, a small town just outside Oslo. In 1971, Petter was working as a sales representative for labeling and pricing equipment, visiting supermarkets across the Oslo area. One of his regular customers was Aage Fremstad, who owned a grocery store in Asker. A conversation Fremstad initiated that year would change the trajectory of both brothers' lives and, eventually, global recycling infrastructure.

Like every retailer in Norway, Fremstad was legally required to accept returned beverage containers. The obligation dated back to 1902, when Norway established one of the world's first deposit return systems for reusable glass bottles. The arrangement, created voluntarily by the beverage and grocery industries, was built on a simple idea: when customers bought a glass bottle, they paid a deposit, which was then returned to them when the bottle was returned to a retailer.

For decades, the system worked reasonably well. Glass bottles came in relatively few formats and were manageable for retailers to handle manually. But by the late 1960s, the complexity was growing. Bottle formats multiplied: different sizes, shapes, producers, and deposit values. What had once been a manageable back-room task became a logistical burden, with employees spending hours counting and sorting containers while storage areas filled with unsorted glass. Breweries, bottlers, and retailers had all tried to find a solution, without success.

Before returning to the Planke brothers, it is worth noting that Norway's deposit system at the time applied only to reusable glass bottles that were collected, cleaned, and refilled rather than melted down or discarded. The concept of a single-use container – the plastic bottle or aluminum can that would come to define modern deposit systems – would come later. When they arrived, they would dramatically increase both the scale of the problem and the opportunity for the machine the brothers were about to build.

Petter told his brother, who was an engineer by trade, about Fremstad's problem, and Tore began developing a prototype in his spare time. The design the brothers eventually settled on featured a single opening through which any bottle could be inserted, an automated recognition system capable of identifying different container types, and a printer that issued a receipt for the deposit value owed. For its time, it was highly advanced engineering, combining sensor technology, mechanical handling, and early computing.

Aage Fremstad alongside TOMRA's first reverse vending machine.

The first reverse vending machine was loaded into the back of Petter's Renault 16 and delivered to Fremstad's store on January 2, 1972. The response was immediate. Fremstad called it his best investment, and customers loved the convenience of feeding bottles into a machine and receiving a receipt instead of handing containers to store employees over the counter.

Sensing they were onto something, the brothers immediately began producing more machines, and within just the first couple of months, they had sold 15. Since the same problem existed beyond Asker, the opportunity did as well. On April 1, 1972, Petter and Tore Planke officially founded TOMRA.

Scaling the solution

The name TOMRA comes from the acronym TOMflaske Registrerings Automat, Norwegian for “empty bottle registration machine,” pragmatically explaining the function of the RVM. The environmental aspect behind the system was always part of the vision. From the beginning, the Planke brothers believed recovering and reusing material served a broader purpose. Still, in the early years, TOMRA's focus was pragmatic: retailers needed a better way to manage returns, and the brothers had built a machine that solved the problem. Over time, the scale of what deposit systems could achieve would become central to the company's identity.

By the end of its first year, 29 machines were operating across Norway, driven by retailers facing the same problems that Fremstad had described to Petter. Tore's technical expertise and Petter's commercial instincts proved a perfect combination as they scaled the family enterprise beyond Asker.

The first major signal that TOMRA's idea could travel came from just across the border, where Sweden had long operated a similar system of reusable glass bottles with deposits. Systembolaget, the Swedish state alcohol monopoly, was legally required to accept returned containers just as Norwegian retailers were. In 1974, it ordered 100 TOMRA machines, specially adapted to fit the conveyor equipment already installed in its stores.

The order validated both the technology and the opportunity ahead. If the same inefficiencies existed beyond Asker and beyond Norway, why not expand into every market with a deposit return system? In the years that followed, TOMRA established subsidiaries in Sweden, Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Germany – markets where deposit systems were already in place and manual handling was ready for an upgrade.

The next leap came from inside the machine itself. Early reverse vending machines had to be manually programmed to recognize specific bottle types, an approach that became increasingly impractical as beverage formats multiplied. In 1977, TOMRA launched the TOMRA SP, the world's first self-programmable reverse vending machine. Using laser, fiber optic, and microprocessor technology, the SP could recognize and adapt to new container types without manual reconfiguration.

The Planke brothers and TOMRA had been pioneers from the start, but the SP established a clear technological lead and laid the foundation for the company's next phase of growth.