CRAB Traceability Systems
CRAB Traceability Systems turns waste and material streams into measurable data through mobile AI vision, letting municipalities, waste professionals, recyclers and packaging designers analyse litter, bale contamination and sorting quality from a phone, a portable camera or an API.
What is CRAB Traceability Systems?
CRAB Traceability Systems is a Luxembourg platform that uses computer vision to trace what actually happens to materials, products and packaging at the end of their life. The name is an acronym: Circular Resource Analysis Bridge. Its stated purpose is to open the black box of end-of-life resource flows through analysis that is cheap to deploy and does not depend on fixed infrastructure or manual audits.
The offer is built on four blocks. An API lets an organisation push its own image or video feeds to the backend and receive structured AI analysis in return. A mobile app with built-in AI vision serves field teams, who photograph waste, bales, loads or containers and get an immediate reading. A portable AI camera, described as patent pending, can be used handheld, mounted on rail-bars or overhangs, or fixed to a lightweight aluminium frame. A centralised dashboard gathers detections, trends, flagged issues and reports across devices and locations. These are packaged commercially as three routes: PaaS, the mobile app, and an all-in-one SaaS kit combining camera, app and dashboard.
Four audiences are addressed directly. Municipalities get a gamified citizen app that turns smartphones into litter-reporting tools while feeding staff a hotspot map. Waste professionals replace clipboard audits with standardised inspections that can be run on site and shared instantly, removing travel. Sorting and recycling facilities monitor conveyor lines and bale quality with fixed, mobile or semi-mobile cameras, and can adjust sorter settings on live composition data; sites that already own cameras can send existing feeds for cloud processing. Product and packaging designers use the same end-of-life evidence to run sortability simulations and recyclability scoring against the RecyClass framework.
The company traces its origins to research at the University of Luxembourg begun in 2019, with two peer-reviewed papers published, and was founded by three scientists. Access to the product is through a multi-tenant web application; there is no public pricing and no self-service sign-up, so evaluation starts with a demo request.
What it does
- Analyse litter, illegal dumping or facility spots straight from a phone or tablet
- Upload images or video to the cloud through the API and receive structured AI analysis and reports
- Measure material composition and contamination on bales, loads and containers
- Deploy a portable AI camera handheld, on rail-bars, on overhangs or on a light aluminium frame
- Geotag every detection and map litter hotspots across a municipality
- Track trends, trigger threshold alerts and generate reports from a centralised dashboard
- Simulate how a packaging design will behave in real sorting and recycling facilities
When to use CRAB Traceability Systems / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if CRAB Traceability Systems is the right fit.
When to use CRAB Traceability Systems
- Municipalities and public works teams tackling street litter, illegal dumping and unmapped waste hotspots
- Sorting and recycling facility operators who need contamination and material-quality figures without manual audits
- Waste professionals losing hours to travel, clipboard inspections and audit reporting
- Packaging and product designers who want real end-of-life evidence rather than recyclability assumptions
- Quality and compliance staff who must produce documented, data-backed reports for regulators and customers
When not to use CRAB Traceability Systems
- Buyers who need a published price list, since nothing is costed anywhere on the site
- Anyone hoping to self-serve, as there is no free plan, no announced trial and no open sign-up path
- Teams expecting a store-installable app: nothing is published on the App Store or Google Play
- Developers who want to evaluate the API alone, because no public documentation exists
- Organisations needing an interface in a language other than English
How to use CRAB Traceability Systems
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Identify which of the four use cases fits: public services, waste professionals, sorting and recycling, or circularity tracing for design
- Read the matching solution page to see which capabilities apply
- Request a demonstration through the demo form, giving website, full name, company name and email
- Alternatively use the contact form, which promises a reply within 24 hours on working days
- Agree commercial terms directly with the vendor, since no price is published
- Choose a delivery route: API upload, the mobile AI app, or the all-in-one camera and dashboard kit
- Receive a tenant workspace and sign in from the login page using the website identifier, email and password
- For the API route, connect your own image or video feeds to the backend and consume the structured analysis
- For the field route, photograph waste, bales or containers from a phone or tablet and read the analysis
- Monitor detections, contamination thresholds and trends from the dashboard and export the reports
Pros & Cons
Pros
- No fixed installation, no facility downtime and no construction work required
- One technology base spans field collection, sorting lines and product design
- Real end-of-life measurements replace assumptions in an industry used to estimates
- Unusually complete legal identity is published: registry number, VAT, seat, director and telephone
- Personal data hosting is stated plainly as Azure in France
- Public scientific grounding, with two peer-reviewed papers and a university origin
- Recognised by Luxembourg innovation programmes and awards, including first prize at CYEL 2025
Cons
- No price is published anywhere, and no free plan or trial is announced
- An API is sold commercially but no public documentation exists to evaluate it
- A mobile app is marketed although nothing is published on the App Store or Google Play
- The privacy policy is in French on an English site, with no effective date or version
- That same policy contains unedited e-commerce template text about shopping carts and shipping products
- No Data Processing Agreement and no subprocessor list are published
- Knowledge Hub and Case Studies sections are announced but hold no published content
Pricing & Plans
No pricing is published. The site displays no price list, no currency and no figure of any kind, and dedicated pricing paths return errors. No permanently free plan is offered and no free trial is announced, although the vendor does not state that either is unavailable. Commercial terms are established individually: prospects are directed to a demonstration request or the contact form. Because no entry-level amount is public, the starting price, currency and billing unit are deliberately left empty rather than filled with a figure that could mislead.
- PaaS — API upload of images or video
- returning structured AI analysis and reports
- presented as quick
- scalable and customisable
- no price published
- Mobile AI App — mobile and web application with AI vision for field teams
- no price published
- SaaS — all-in-one kit combining the mobile AI camera system
- the application and the dashboard
- no price published
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how CRAB Traceability Systems handles your data.
GDPR overview
GDPR implementation is concrete but partial. The policy cites Article 13 for the information duty and Article 6 for legal bases, listing consent (6.1.a), contract (6.1.b) and legitimate interest (6.1.f) against each data item. Data-subject rights are enumerated: access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability and withdrawal of consent, exercised by a dated and signed request to CRAB, which reserves the right to verify identity. Retention periods are given for website and contact data. Against that, no Data Protection Officer is named, no supervisory authority is mentioned, and the page carries no effective date or version number. The site nowhere claims outright to be GDPR compliant, so the compliance field is left blank rather than asserted. No Article 27 representative is designated, which is consistent with a controller established in Luxembourg.
Who owns the data?
The controller is named explicitly: CRAB Traceability Systems S.à r.l., 7A rue de Steinsel, 7254 Bereldange, Luxembourg, registered under RCS B288220 and VAT LU35921410, reachable at info@crab-ts.com. The privacy policy, written in French although the site is English, covers only website and contact data: IP address, first name, surname, email and telephone number. It states that providing this data is optional when registering as a client and that consent may be withdrawn at any time by a simple email. On content, it says only that audiovisual material uploaded to the site remains covered by image rights and copyright. Ownership of the images, videos and analyses processed by the platform itself is never addressed.
Reuse rights
The policy sets out three legal bases: consent, contract and legitimate interest. The IP address is kept on legitimate-interest grounds, with legal action in case of an offence given as the stated motive; name, telephone and email are processed for consent, contract and service delivery. It also warns that, in the event of an online purchase, personal data may be transmitted to or made accessible by other companies, without naming any of them. Nothing grants the end user a right to reuse data, and no licence terms are published. Critically, the documents never say whether customer images, videos or analyses are used to train the AI models, and no opt-out is described.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
The privacy policy addresses hosting twice and gives the same answer both times: personal data is hosted on Microsoft Azure, in a data centre located in France. It adds that data is stored in a secure computing environment, while acknowledging that no system is entirely safe from loss, misuse or unauthorised access. No broader region such as the EU or EEA is named, so France should be read as the stated jurisdiction rather than as shorthand for Europe. The controller is established in Luxembourg, which places the processing under EU law and a Luxembourg supervisory authority, although the policy never names that authority. Two gaps are worth noting. No security certification of any kind — ISO 27001, SOC 2 or otherwise — is claimed anywhere on the site, and no subprocessor list or Data Processing Agreement is published, so the chain of processors behind Azure is not documented. Separately, the public website itself is served from Amazon Web Services in Frankfurt, Germany; that concerns the marketing site rather than the platform data, and the two should not be conflated.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting CRAB Traceability Systems.
- No pricing is published at all, so budget exposure cannot be assessed before entering a sales conversation
- The privacy policy contains unedited e-commerce template text about shopping carts and shipping products, so it should not be read as describing the actual platform
- The site's footer labels the privacy page as Terms & Conditions: there is no separate contract document to review
- Nothing is said about whether uploaded images and videos are used to train the AI models, and no opt-out is described
- Automated material recognition can be treated as ground truth: readings drive sorter settings and supplier assessments, so accuracy limits and human review still matter
- The citizen-facing app geotags every detection, which creates location data about the people reporting as well as about the waste
- The homepage renders nothing without JavaScript, and neither robots.txt nor a sitemap is published, so the site is hard to audit independently
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Deliberately low, and marketed as such: minimal setup, no installation downtime and no complex configuration. The lightest route is the mobile app, where taking a photograph is enough. The portable camera needs positioning — handheld, on a rail-bar, an overhang or an aluminium frame — but no permanent works. The API route is the most demanding, requiring an organisation to connect its own image or video feeds to the backend; with no public documentation available, the integration effort cannot be estimated in advance and must be scoped with the vendor.
Deployment
Supported languages
Behind CRAB Traceability Systems
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
What does CRAB Traceability Systems actually do?
What does the name CRAB stand for?
Do I need to install fixed equipment in my facility?
Is there an API?
Is there a mobile app I can download?
How much does it cost?
Where is the data hosted?
Who is behind the tool?
Which languages are supported?
Is the technology backed by published research?
Should you pick CRAB Traceability Systems?
CRAB Traceability Systems occupies a genuinely underserved niche: measuring what happens to materials once they are discarded, and feeding that evidence back to the people who design products. The proposition is coherent, and the refusal to depend on fixed installations is the thread that holds the four use cases together — a phone, a portable camera and an API cover the street, the sorting line and the design office with one technology base. The scientific grounding is unusually visible for a young company, with two peer-reviewed papers, a university origin traced to 2019 and a patent-pending camera system.
Transparency is uneven, though, and the split is instructive. Legal identity is published exemplarily: registry number, VAT number, registered seat, named director and a telephone number all appear in the Impressum. Product transparency is much weaker. There is no price of any kind, no API documentation behind a commercially sold API, no app in either mobile store behind a marketed mobile app, and no Data Processing Agreement or subprocessor list. Several advertised sections — the Knowledge Hub, the case studies — are announced but empty, and the privacy policy still carries unedited template text about shopping carts and shipping products, which sits oddly on a waste-traceability platform.
The company was registered on 31 July 2024 and describes its first field pilots as taking place in 2025, so this is an early-stage vendor being assessed as such. Buyers should expect a conversation rather than a checkout: every route to the product runs through a demonstration request. For municipalities, recyclers and packaging teams who need defensible end-of-life data, it is worth the enquiry — provided the commercial and technical detail the website withholds is obtained directly.
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