A certificate of destruction confirms the end result. What about everything that happened before it?

Brands routinely send recalled, defective, returned, obsolete and other sensitive products downstream for destruction. Once those products leave their direct custody, visibility can disappear quickly. A certificate may eventually confirm the outcome, but it doesn’t necessarily show everything that happened along the way.

The consequences can be significant. Morgan Stanley was hit with $95 million in regulatory penalties following failures linked to the decommissioning of thousands of servers and hard drives. Thousands of devices were sold downstream, some containing customer data, while the vast majority were never recovered.

Founded by Eric Holmdahl and Eva Wallack in 2023, Ouro Circularity is changing how that downstream journey is documented. Its technology creates a verifiable record of what happens to products as they move through third-party processors, connecting the evidence collected along the way rather than relying solely on what is produced at the end.

The physical infrastructure for product destruction already exists. Ouro is building the information infrastructure around it.

Custody handoffs, photographs, video, documents, weights, processing events and final material outcomes can all exist, but that evidence is often spread across emails, spreadsheets, PDFs, text messages and different internal systems. Ouro connects it around the individual order, creating a shared digital chain of custody between the companies that own products and the partners physically handling them.

It changes the role of the Certificate of Destruction. Ouro's view is that the certificate should be the output of a verifiable chain of custody, not the entirety of it. The proof is built throughout the process, rather than assembled at the end.

Ouro's mobile platform allows operators to scan assets in and out, capture paperwork on site and record destruction events as they happen. Stationary cameras add another layer, providing an operator-independent source of evidence while AI analysis can flag suspicious activity and surface relevant footage against a specific job or material movement. The technology has already helped stop a theft attempt in a live customer environment.

That information follows the job through to reporting. Once processing is complete, destruction certificates and diversion reports can be generated immediately, bringing together verified weights, manifests, transaction records and supporting documents without teams having to manually assemble the evidence afterwards. Because Ouro is designed to work across organisational and geographic boundaries, that chain of custody can continue as products move between multiple companies and locations.

For brands, that means continued visibility once products leave their control. For recyclers and destruction facilities, it creates a stronger way of demonstrating how products have been handled and where materials ultimately went.

Advanced Polymer Recycling provides an example of what that can mean in practice. The company processes high volumes of e-waste, recalled products and other sensitive downstream materials, using Ouro within live production workflows to capture chain-of-custody information, processing evidence, documentation and downstream material outcomes.

Since implementing Ouro's tracking, certificates and reporting, APR has secured multiple new clients and jobs, while removing hours of manual documentation and reporting from each job. The commercial impact is particularly interesting: better evidence isn't just making the operation easier to manage, it's helping the processor win business.

Ouro's development isn't limited to the US. The company is already active in the UK and is a verified vendor participating in the UK's emerging Digital Waste Tracking ecosystem, with Phase 1 rolling out in October 2026.

That aligns closely with what Ouro has been building. Digital Waste Tracking is centred around stronger documentation of waste movement, custody, destination and material outcomes; the same fundamental information Ouro captures as products and materials move between organisations.

For a company founded only three years ago, having live commercial deployments in the US while already participating in the UK's move towards digital waste traceability gives the wider ambition considerably more substance.

Now revenue-generating and operating multi-year commercial deployments, Ouro is expanding its network of brands, destruction facilities, recyclers, reverse logistics providers and compliance teams, allowing the same verification infrastructure to continue across multiple facilities and organisations.

Product destruction is the starting point. Longer term, Ouro sees the same infrastructure supporting wider waste and material flows where companies need reliable information as materials move through the physical world. That could extend into MRFs, hazardous waste facilities, recyclers and other operators where reliable downstream data remains difficult to capture.

Ouro’s long-term goal is to make the full downstream supply chain as visible and verifiable as the forward supply chain.

Ouro is actively expanding its network and wants to hear from brands managing product destruction, recalls, returns and other high-liability inventory, alongside recyclers, secure destruction providers, downstream processors and reverse logistics teams.

To learn more, visit ourocircularity.com or contact Eva Wallack, Co-Founder, President & COO, at [email protected].

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