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F O C U S M A N U F A C T U R I N G E X C E L L E N C E A W A R D S 16 Worcester Business Journal | March 20, 2023 | wbjournal.com And once again, your Best Bank. Your local bank. Your community bank. Thank you for voting us Worcester's Best Bank for Business. Connecting all offices: 800.578.4270 • www.unibank.com Member FDIC/Member DIF Contact us at 508.849.4303, scan this code or visit unibank. com/business for all your business loan and deposit needs. OFFICIAL FOUNDING PARTNER OF THE VALIS develops technology to improve scrap recycling V ALIS does not manufac- ture anything. Instead, the Worcester-based startup, which grew out of an idea at Worcester Poly- technic Institute and the Leominster research-and-development company Solvus Global, gives recycling factories solutions by offering them proprietary soware to help them make decisions and provide solutions about what to do with the materials those recyclers have collected. e company's VALI-Sort soware can integrate with sensor-based recy- cling technology to capture and collect material data, as well as additional industry data streams. e information gives recyclers the ability to see and sort the materials they have collected, specif- ically industrial materials like metal. "To effectively recycle, you need to know what it is," VALIS CEO and Co-founder Emily Molstad said. Until VALIS came along, the process of figuring out what materials were recycled was done manually. Now the soware can scan and learn, which gives recyclers an advantage and a stockpile of data so they can explore the market- place. All of this allows those recycling com- panies to upcycle the materials instead of downcycling, where they make less profit and end up removing some of the valuable metals from the manufacturing stream. Now, those valuable materials can be used again, somewhat replacing the need to mine raw materials and form new metals, which is harmful for the environment. Take aluminum, for BY KEVIN KOCZWARA WBJ Staff Writer VALIS Chief Technology Officer Caleb Ralphs examines the company's software performance at a metal recycler.