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Earth AI Robotics

Can Robots Solve America's Recycling Crisis? (cnbc.com) 148

Posted by EditorDavid from the robo-recycler dept.
CNBC reports that to solve America's recycling crisis, "companies and municipalities are turning to AI-assisted robots." The problem began last year when China, the world's largest recyclable processor, stopped accepting most American scrap plastic and cardboard due to contamination problems, and a glut of plastics overwhelming its own processing facilities. Historically, China recycled the bulk of U.S. waste... The situation is dire for many local economies as recycling costs skyrocket. It's forced many cities and some small communities to stop recycling all together. Now more waste is ending up in landfills and incinerators.

To tackle this environmental catastrophe, U.S. companies and researchers are developing AI-assisted robotic technology that can work with humans in processing plants and improve quality control. The goal is to have robots do a better job at sorting garbage and reduce the contamination and health hazards human workers face in recycling plants every day. Sorting trash is a dirty and dangerous job. Recycling workers are more than twice as likely as other workers to be injured on the job, according to a report at the University of Illinois School of Public Health. The profession also has high fatality rates.

The way the robots work is simple. Guided by cameras and computer systems trained to recognize specific objects, the robots' arms glide over moving conveyor belts until they reach their target. Oversized tongs or fingers with sensors that are attached to the arms snag cans, glass, plastic containers, and other recyclable items out of the rubbish and place them into nearby bins. The robots -- most of which have come online only within the past year -- are assisting human workers and can work up to twice as fast.
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Can Robots Solve America's Recycling Crisis? More

Can Robots Solve America's Recycling Crisis?

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  • Yes (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jader3rd ( 2222716 ) on Sunday July 28, 2019 @11:37AM (#59001408)
    Robots are the only ones who can.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

      Or pay people $15/hour to do that, then look at what cost that would add to it including health issues.

      Maybe products in the shops are too cheap.

    • What would be interesting is to see this in action, maybe on youtube?

      • For one such system, just google Max AI, made by Bulk Handling Systems

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

        We looked at these systems for positively sorting (picking out what we want, vs rejecting what we don't) used beverage containers. They are really impressive machines which can positively pick about 95% of the materials we want. It wasn't the right fit for our particular scenario, but still impressive.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Stop using disposable water bottles (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    That would probably cut down on 1/2 the plastic waste.

    CAPTCHA: cyanide

  • Or... or... don't hate me for saying this but.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 28, 2019 @11:43AM (#59001440)

    We can stop putting items in twice to 150 times the amount of plastic needed to contain them.

    YES I AM LOOKING AT YOU, SD CARD MAKERS!!!!

    Also you sick bastards who put a pair of scissors in plastic packaging that requires a pair of scissors to open >.>

    • Food, too (Score:4, Insightful)

      by DogDude ( 805747 ) on Sunday July 28, 2019 @12:45PM (#59001686)
      Absolutely! Everything is unnecessarily plasticized. I try to go to my farmers' market and my local food co-op to buy food that isn't wrapped in plastic, as well.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      We can stop putting items in twice to 150 times the amount of plastic needed to contain them.

      YES I AM LOOKING AT YOU, SD CARD MAKERS!!!!

      Makes sense in non-retail settings. However, retail sales have a shrinkage problem, so larger packaging is often requested to prevent those small things from growing legs and walking out the door.

      Alternatives exist - you could do it Ikea style where you pick up a card and trade it in at the cashier, forcing them to walk behind and get the item and holding up the line. And o

    • One that's just irked me is that Johnson & Johnson just changed the lid of 'baby shampoo'. The lid has (for years) been a screw on/off affair, but has just been changed to one that is virtually impossible to remove. Thus, the bottle has become (for all intents and purposes) unrecyclable - just because I/they can't remove the bloody lid.

      I'm sure J&J would say that it's all about 'security' and making sure the product isn't tampered with before it gets to me - but if a coke bottle lid can do it, I'm s

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by vlad30 ( 44644 )
      Main reason why that sd card and other small valuable things are in really big packages is theft then the thieves started buying cargo pants with big pockets and the packaging just got bigger making it hard to open to stop the same theives from opening the packet and taking the product in store the scissors were put in packets so they couldn't use them. wash rinse, repeat

  • WALL-E (Score:2)

    by Snard ( 61584 )
    That's the first thing that popped into my head when I saw the article headline. The robots can take care of the garbage/recycling problem, and we'll come back once they finish.

  • charge the companies (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    We need to financially disincentivize the use of wasteful/harmful products. Meaning. Whatever it costs to fully recycle a product should be a fee assessed to the product itself.

  • Yes but no. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Sunday July 28, 2019 @12:14PM (#59001524)

    Yes, robots absolutely could enable better recycling. However, no, they won't solve our short-term crisis because of the investment cost. This said, the current situational change ("crisis") is just a hiccup compared to the real problem. The real problem is that it doesn't cost much money to just throw things away and there is entirely no penalty for making products that are difficult to recycle. Eventually, humanity will be forced to face this fact and either start charging companies the cost of recycling or heavily subsidize it.

    The other possibilities is we create recycling that is less costly than using new material (unlikely/very far off/100% automation), there is an enormous culture shift that changes corporations (exceptionally unlikely) or humanity goes extinct (maybe).

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The real problem is single-stream re-cycling.

      Yes, that's heretical and totally counter to the current thinking but if consumers were to separate out their plastics,
      ordinary paper, cardboard, newspapers, glass, and other categories, so that the municipal waste facilities collecting
      the stuff would be able to get more per ton for a given type of recycleable material, it would be a win-win for the
      taxpayers as well as the material purchasers. I've seen it work in one place in northern New England, and I've seen
      t

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Rei ( 128717 )

        The problem with plastics - the hard part - is that there's not just one substance known as "plastic". There's numerous different kinds in consumer products, which cannot be recycled together (and some can't be recycled at all). Many times there will even be multiple types of plastic used in a consumer product (for example, water bottles made out of PET with polypropylene caps and rings). There's no way you're going to teach consumers how to sort different types of plastics from one another.

        • Do most people even know what plastic is? Like what it's made 9f and where it comes from? That would be a necessary first step

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kohath ( 38547 )

      Eventually, humanity will be forced to face this fact and either start charging companies the cost of recycling or heavily subsidize it.

      Why? Landfill space is effectively infinite. Old landfills get covered over and made into green spaces or highways or airports.

      Meanwhile, recycling that actually makes economic sense needs no additional encouragement beyond the ability to profit.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sfcat ( 872532 )

      Yes, robots absolutely could enable better recycling. However, no, they won't solve our short-term crisis because of the investment cost. This said, the current situational change ("crisis") is just a hiccup compared to the real problem. The real problem is that it doesn't cost much money to just throw things away and there is entirely no penalty for making products that are difficult to recycle. Eventually, humanity will be forced to face this fact and either start charging companies the cost of recycling or heavily subsidize it.

      The other possibilities is we create recycling that is less costly than using new material (unlikely/very far off/100% automation), there is an enormous culture shift that changes corporations (exceptionally unlikely) or humanity goes extinct (maybe).

      Close but not quite. That is half of the real problem. The other half is that it takes a lot of cheap energy to make recycling work. Otherwise its cheaper and easier to just mine new materials. Aluminium is the most energy intensive raw material to mine and process. Which is why we have always recycled Al cans. Other materials take less energy to mine and process than recycling needs quite often. When it doesn't, recycling has a chance but the energy needed to sort and separate out the desired materi

  • Been actually thinking about this lately. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Rei ( 128717 ) on Sunday July 28, 2019 @12:16PM (#59001530) Homepage

    Specifically, how to recover valuable elements left over from the ~5% of mixed, unprocessable waste that even a good recycling plant will leave behind. I was thinking a resurrection of the old peroxydisulfuric acid (Marshall's Acid) process for electrolytic hydrogen peroxide production that was replaced by the anthraquinone process. You have Marshall's acid, converting to piranha solution - an intensely aggressive oxidizer of organics, to the point that it will even break down soot / graphitic carbon, eliminating essentially all organics except fluorocarbons. Non-noble metals would be dissolved and deposited at the cathodes (selective electrodeposition isolating individual metals) in the electrolytic cell that generate the peroxydisulfuric acid. The remaining waste should be noble metals, fluorinated hydrocarbons, ceramics, glasses, and other resistant oxides. Noble metals could be extracted by a followup bath a similarly regenerated hot HCl + H2O2 bath, HNO3 (limited concentration) + H2O2, or aqua regia. Smelting or simple high temperature incineration of the tailings should yield fluorine recovery in the flue gases.

    It wouldn't be an efficient way to deal with bulk waste, but for difficult waste streams... I don't know, just something I've been idly thinking about.

  • Robots=short term solution (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 ) on Sunday July 28, 2019 @12:17PM (#59001532) Journal
    The long-term, permanent solution is to prevent the waste from being created in the first place. Find replacements for all this plastic, something that either can be recycled easier, or that degrades safely into something non-toxic (preferably good for the soil) in a landfill.
    • Absolutely! We need to figure out how to use (and create) significantly less plastic. That's the root of the problem.
    • Which is why we're fucked. The only people in the world who are willing to pay the premium for such substances are so wealthy that they're responsible for more waste than a combined 1,000 of the other people who can't afford such substances.
    • My guess is that a lot of consumer waste is plastic single use water bottles and single use takeout containers for food and such. My thought would be: stop selling bottled water, and carry a dish/bowl and cutlery with you in your bag. Problem solved.

  • The way the robots work is simple. Guided by cameras and computer systems trained to recognize specific objects, the robots' arms glide over moving conveyor belts until they reach their target. Oversized tongs or fingers with sensors that are attached to the arms snag cans, glass, plastic containers, and other recyclable items out of the rubbish and place them into nearby bins.

    There is no part of that which sounds simple.

    • It doesn't sound simple to me either, but then, my desk is covered in animatronics crap right now.

      But it is all doable. The more difficult thing is likely to be rejecting dirty items. Or more realistically, identifying the small percent of items that are clean.

      Co-mingled recycling by people who don't care about recycling will never get away from that problem.

      • Or more realistically, identifying the small percent of items that are clean.

        When you say it like that, maybe it would be simpler to just wash everything.

        • It isn't that easy to wash stuff that is caked on. Mold and biofilms firmly attach themselves to the plastic.

          For glass and metal recycling it is less problematic, because they're processed at high temperatures anyways.

          But the temperatures needed to make that sort of cleaning easy will already melt the plastic. Different plastics break down with different solvents, there is no good solution that you can use before the plastics are fully sorted. And then once it is sorted, the chemicals that could make it eas

          • If it dries on, it takes multiple passes through the machine. That's why the worker who loads the machine has to use a metal brush to clear off most of the particles that are stuck to the plates

            I don't know, modern, high-quality dish washers seem really, really good at washing off the dried-on stuff.

            • You obviously have no experience in a restaurant kitchen.

              If you don't have any relevant experience, just listen.

              You use a word like "high quality," you're obviously talking about home dishwashers. Yeah, they get shit clean because they run for a long, long fucking time. If you think that would be an answer, do some math, calculate the power used, and make the case.

              Just the volume of a home dishwasher and the time it runs should make it obvious that it wouldn't be a reasonable method. That's why I only talke

  • It has start at the manufactures.

    Some basic rule:
    . Cost of recycling or garage collection is INCLUDED in the price of item. so no local garage collection cost to consumer.
    . A) Recycling is cheapest "tax" - say 10% or actual cost to recycle which ever is higher.
    . B) Garbage is very expensive - $20 or 50% which ever is higher.
    C) Hazardist waste - lead acid battery, Car Tires, OIL. double B)
    . D) Pay the consumer to return the items to be recycled, maybe 1/2 the "tax" paid.
    E) If

  • Better recycling sounds good (obviously) but it does seem like there's been a diminishing return on new developments. Recycling will only get us so far and probably not much farther than where we are now.

    Is anyone working on technology to just go to an old landfill and mine it for all the old materials in it? A much harder problem, of course, but that will be a real game-changer.

  • Need more education (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Smidge204 ( 605297 ) on Sunday July 28, 2019 @12:51PM (#59001720) Journal

    So when I was in school, the mantra was "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle." The words were in that order for a reason, but everyone focused on the "Recycle" part which doesn't really solve the problem all on its own. Reduce the amount of material you use (and thus trash you generate). Reuse as much of the material as you can yourself; jars, bottles, bags, boxes, packing material, and so on. Recycle as much of what's left as you can.

    I think another PSA campaign to reintroduce and push this concept would be a very good thing.

    On top of that, some consumer education on exactly what contamination is in (terms of recycling) and how to avoid it would also be helpful. Really simple things like not putting plastic bags in the recycling - "but they're plastic! You recycle plastic!" - Nope, plastic bags and films are not recyclable! They just clog up the machines and need to be removed by workers.

    I think there's enough people who care to make a difference, but they just need to be reminded what to do.
    =Smidge=

    • I think another PSA campaign to reintroduce and push this concept would be a very good thing.

      OH PLEASE DON'T! MAKE IT STOP! HAVE YOU NO MERCY!

      I've been having this "reduce, reuse, recycle" mantra beaten into me since I could read. People got the message, and then they find out that all the efforts they put into sorting their items for recycling were ending up in landfills and rivers anyway. People lost faith in the system. People are just getting fed up with this because it's going too far. Can't we just have a fucking straw with our drink? A straw?

      Not only are people getting tired of this t

      • Too late, people are already dead because of this reusable drinking straw madness.

        https://www.usatoday.com/story... [usatoday.com]

      • They know what to do, they don't need another reminder. They are simply not seeing it working

        This is the biggest problem. When people realized all the painstaking cleaning and separating of their garbage was just ending up in the landfill anyway they lost all interest and hope. Regaining that is the biggest hurdle to rekindling peoples interest in recycling.
        We found a recycler who we could trust (we inspected his recycling plant), and he would only take certain types of plastic and metal, AND we had

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        What the hell are people doing to their grocery bags that gets them ill? Do they not wash the produce they put in there?

    • For most people the 'reuse' step has very limited capacity. Since we're generally talking about long-lived items such as glass and plastic, once you have enough glass and plastic containers you don't really need any more.

      • I think manufacturers can offer a major contribution in this area.

        For example, there's this brand of chocolate hazlenut spread "Nutkao" which not only is a more amusing name than Nutella, but is available in glass jars *specifically designed* to be used as drinking glasses. I have one of these and it's my favorite drinking glass. It's heavy, restaurant quality glassware and you'd never know it used to be a food jar.

        Basically I think more manufacturers could design their packaging with reuse in mind.
        =Smidge=

  • We shouldn't be recycling many of the stuff we recycle now. Paper, plastic, and other such items should just be burned for electricity. Glass should probably be just put in a land fill. Metals should be recycled, there's a real energy savings there.

    I found a video from the Global Warming Policy Foundation advocating this. I don't know who they are but they seem to be talking sense and with a name like that there's probably some leftists out there that might listen to them.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?. [youtube.com]

    • I found a video from the Global Warming Policy Foundation advocating this. I don't know who they are but they seem to be talking sense...

      The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) is a United Kingdom think tank founded by climate change denialist Nigel Lawson with the purpose of combating what the foundation describes as “extremely damaging and harmful policies” designed to mitigate climate change. The group was established on November 22 2009, just three days after the first set of “Cli

  • Yes, I know - radical solution. Hear me out. The price to do something is generally proportional to the resource costs (energy, manpower, materials) of doing it. If recycling is uneconomical, that means the resources needed to do it is greater than the resources needed to make new stuff. So you're actually using more resources by forcing uneconomical recycling, than just giving up on it.

    So what's the real cost of giving up recycling?
    • Metal (particularly steels and tin) will still be mostly recycled.

  • licensing fees (Score:3)

    by AndyKron ( 937105 ) on Sunday July 28, 2019 @02:12PM (#59002158)
    They work great as long as the city keeps up with its software licensing fees.
  • So just to be clear, the US, Canada's and Australia's recycling program up until now was just stick it in containers and send it to China and 3rd world countries because nobody wanted to buy and use the diverted newspaper, plastic and other recyclables other than aluminum, steel and glass. So the answer now is have Robots separate it? How about we just go back to Aluminum Steel and glass, and get rid of the plastic instead?
    • Bravo. Then, no migration of chemicals into food, water, and the environment from these containers.

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