As prices of recycled paper, plastic, and aluminum increase, waste management firms are seeing an unexpected return on investment from their installations of AI-powered robotic trash sorters.
Certainly with any robotic system, the ROI is expected to come from labor saving, but due to a variety of factors such as tariffs on aluminum, pulp mill closures, and others, the price of our trash is becoming intriguingly high.
Republic Services, the nation’s second-largest waste management company, now have AI-powered robotic sorters in one-third of their 79 facilities. These machines, as GNN has reported previously, are trained on thousands of varieties, colors, and states of common trash.
They make thousands of decisions a-minute according to an object’s quality, integrity, and other characteristics, and use claw arms or puffs of air to blow trash this way and that to ensure it arrives in the correct bales.
Take for example Amp Robotics’ Cortex sorting machine, which can pick out 80 separate items from waste streams per minute while recognizing billions of different shapes, sizes, granular specifics, colors, logos, and even SKU numbers among the garbage that would often remain hopelessly entangled.
“There really is value in a lot of recyclables and garbage,” Matanya Horowitz, founder and chief technology officer at Amp, told the Washington Post. “The problem has been that the cost of pulling those materials out is similar to or greater than the actual value of those materials.”
Amp has recently signed a 20-year agreement to operate a materials recovery facility (the technical term for a recycling facility), for Virginia’s Southeastern Public Service Authority, which had an appalling recycling rate of just 7%.
Finished 2-years ago, Amp will get a $50 fee for every ton of waste it takes, and agree to pay damages to the Authority when it fails to divert 50% of the received contents from the landfill, something it so far has never failed to do.
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At Republic Services, the advent of air-blowing machines was a real sea change, as it substantially increased the speed at which even the machine could sort trash. What few workers remain merely guard the start of the conveyor system against dangerous or bulky items.
“Because of the speed, because of the throughput capabilities, we’re starting to see these economies where these are very good investments,” Pete Keller, vice president of recycling and sustainability at Republic Services, told the Post. “And that’s not about labor; that’s about recovery rates, value extraction, purity and quality.”
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The Post’s Ryan Dezember reports that the nation’s largest waste management firm, the aptly-named Waste Management, has spent $1.4 billion on trash sorting robots for their facilities. Their third-quarter profits rose 18% on higher quantity and quality of sales of recycled material.
Job loss is often presented as a drawback to AI-driven automation, but as many outlets have reported, most people don’t want to work at a recycling facility; and should we as a society really want them to either?
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