How Renewi went from 22% compliance rate to 71% and 40,000 training certificates centralized

Certificates in a drawer

Renewi is a waste-to-product company operating across the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Portugal, collecting waste and returning it to society as a usable product. With over 6,000 employees across roughly 120 sites and nearly 900 job roles, managing mandatory training and certification had become a serious problem. The data existed, but nobody knew where it was.

“All our certifications of our employees were all over the place. Some were on a desktop, some were in an HR system, some were just in a drawer of an operator,” said Alex Baggerman, Renewi’s Group Director of Talent & Learning.

Each site tracked training differently. That meant dozens of Excel files, fragmented data, no consistent view of who was qualified for what, and no reliable way to find out before an auditor asked.

A compliance rate that made the problem impossible to ignore

Before AG5, Renewi’s workforce compliance rate stood at 22%. This was a foundational failure that carried real regulatory risk.

An audit report eventually made it formal, exposing gaps in required blue-collar training across multiple sites. That finding triggered what Renewi called the “License to Operate” project, a company-wide initiative to centralize and standardize all training data.

“We didn’t have control over what kind of certificate was expired, what kind of certificate was needed, what kind of certificate was maybe over-trained,” Baggerman said. “I like to have things boring and predictable, and at the moment it was not boring and it was not predictable, so it was a lot of stress.”

We started at a compliancy level of 22%. After the implementation, we are at 71%, and now it’s still counting.

Alex Baggerman

Group Director Talent & Learning, Renewi

One thing, done very well

Renewi evaluated their options and chose AG5 for its practicality, ease of use, and accessibility via mobile app as well as desktop, and purpose-built for exactly this problem.

“AG5 can just do the trick. They do one thing very well,” Baggerman said.

The Renewi team began with a structured rollout. First, they collected and validated data from all 120 locations, along the way discovering 40,000 certificates stored in legacy systems and 354 learning objects scattered across departments, all managed by a lean team of just 1.5 FTEs. They aligned qualification requirements across departments, brought managers into feedback loops after each implementation round, and placed ownership deliberately with operations rather than IT.

“We found more success when HR facilitated the process, but operations took ownership of compliance,” Baggerman said.

Boring and predictable, in the best possible way

The compliance rate tells the clearest story of License to Operate’s success, with rates dramatically leaping from 22% to 71%. Those numbers are still rising. The day-to-day experience at Renewi has shifted just as significantly. Audit preparation, once a weeks-long scramble to locate and compile evidence, is now something the team handles on demand.

“Normally for an audit, you need to prepare a lot of stuff, and now you just can go to the audit, so that also saves you a lot of time in preparation,” Baggerman said.

Now, compliance is visible and reliable. We can focus on improving skills, not chasing certificates.

Alex Baggerman

Group Director Talent & Learning, Renewi

Renewi is now extending the system to training vendors and external employees. The goal is the same one that drove the project from the start: to create a compliance picture that is consistent, provable, and with no room for surprises.

“AG5 gave us a foundation. We now have control, visibility, and a model we can build on,” Baggerman said.