Robots Sort Recyclables

Very few recycling facilities are efficient enough to provide companies with high-quality raw materials for reuse. To solve this problem, the Amp Robotics company uses AI to design robot trash pickers that work 24 hours a day at numerous recycling facilities throughout the US. These smart sorting machines remove contaminants from waste conveyor belts, and sort various plastics into bins with amazing accuracy. The machines can pick out 80 separate items per minute from waste streams, which is much faster than human sorting. They are able to recognize billions of different shapes, sizes, colours, and logos that would otherwise remain not be culled. These robots can even read the SKU number of an item moving down the conveyor, and this shows it what chemicals are used in the fabrication of the plastic. (Most plastics have an SKU number to identify it.) The machines are already almost 99% accurate, and they become even more accurate every year because they continue “learning” while they are sorting the waste. Amp Robotics is just one of several companies that are making recycling futuristic.