Can This Startup Solve Our Recycling Problems With a New AI-Powered Appliance? (msn.com) 57
The Washington Post profiles Lasso Loop, the startup behind "a hefty home appliance machine that automatically sorts and breaks down the recyclables you toss inside it," saying the company tackles "a flaw in our waste management systems that many people probably aren't aware of."
As it turns out, much of the material we toss into our recycling bins doesn't actually ever get recycled. That's for a whole host of reasons: improperly cleaned materials can contaminate others that would have been recyclable otherwise, and some of the items people might just assume are recyclable — say, plastic cutlery — usually aren't. And ultimately, that means more trips to the landfill....
In its current form, the company's Lasso machine is bigger than a dishwasher but smaller than a fridge, though the team hopes to be able to squeeze the final model under your countertops. What's more interesting is the stuff inside: Lasso growth manager Dominique Leonard said the machine uses a smattering of sensors, cameras and AI to determine whether the stuff you've put inside it can be recycled. (Anything that doesn't pass muster, like certain kinds of plastic, are summarily rejected.) From there, the remaining plastic, glass and metal products are steam cleaned, broken apart — seriously — and stored separately in a series of bins based on type to prevent contamination....
[T]hat sophistication will come at a cost, especially at first. The Lasso team plans to sell its machine for $5,000 — or $3,500 with a prelaunch discount — to start, though it hopes incentives from local governments will help lighten the load on potential customers.
The Post adds that Lasso is launching a pilot program with customers in the San Francisco Bay area next year, in which "owners are meant to schedule pickups from a smartphone app" (which summons Lasso subcontractors).
The Post also profiled ClearDrop, a startup from Texas businessman Ivan Arbouzov that makes a trash can-sized compactor just for single-use plastic bags: You're meant to feed all of your soft plastics into a slot onto the top of the machine, and once it has had enough — Arbouzov said that usually takes around a month — the Minimizer heats and compresses the bags to form a slightly squishy brick. If your municipality is one of the rare ones that accepts soft plastics, you should be able to toss those bricks into your recycling bin. "If worse comes to worse, you can still take it to Walmart and put it in their box," said Arbouzov.
In other words, you're meant to toss your (acceptable) plastics into both machines and move on with your life.
In its current form, the company's Lasso machine is bigger than a dishwasher but smaller than a fridge, though the team hopes to be able to squeeze the final model under your countertops. What's more interesting is the stuff inside: Lasso growth manager Dominique Leonard said the machine uses a smattering of sensors, cameras and AI to determine whether the stuff you've put inside it can be recycled. (Anything that doesn't pass muster, like certain kinds of plastic, are summarily rejected.) From there, the remaining plastic, glass and metal products are steam cleaned, broken apart — seriously — and stored separately in a series of bins based on type to prevent contamination....
[T]hat sophistication will come at a cost, especially at first. The Lasso team plans to sell its machine for $5,000 — or $3,500 with a prelaunch discount — to start, though it hopes incentives from local governments will help lighten the load on potential customers.
The Post adds that Lasso is launching a pilot program with customers in the San Francisco Bay area next year, in which "owners are meant to schedule pickups from a smartphone app" (which summons Lasso subcontractors).
The Post also profiled ClearDrop, a startup from Texas businessman Ivan Arbouzov that makes a trash can-sized compactor just for single-use plastic bags: You're meant to feed all of your soft plastics into a slot onto the top of the machine, and once it has had enough — Arbouzov said that usually takes around a month — the Minimizer heats and compresses the bags to form a slightly squishy brick. If your municipality is one of the rare ones that accepts soft plastics, you should be able to toss those bricks into your recycling bin. "If worse comes to worse, you can still take it to Walmart and put it in their box," said Arbouzov.
In other words, you're meant to toss your (acceptable) plastics into both machines and move on with your life.
No, like, absolutely no. (Score:5, Insightful)
Is this question seriously "Can a $5000 device filled with mechanical and computational complexity process and sort our garbage better?". I am not an expert but that seems like a question removed of common sense and from the hurried fever dreams of the worst Silicon Valley tech bro.
Will this thing process enough recyclables to make up for it's total production energy input and the energy cost required to steam clean said trash? Multiply that to 10,000, 100,000 homes? This seems like such an "American" solution; i.e. don't bother with investing in pulic infrastructure required to solve said problem and frame it as an individual problem, thus exacerbating what is clearly a collective action problem.
Other countries alreayd do recycling much more effectively than America. This is a culture and regulation problem, not a "solve it with a gizmo" problem.
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Indeed. If any of this technology can help at all I'd expect it to be far better to have it at the waste recycling centres so as to reduce their costs and increase their yields. I'd hope at least some of them have been/are investigating such.
I've heard anecdotally about recycling in Japan putting more more onus on the households to sort and clean things first so as to make the central recycling much more efficient.
My personal experience here in the UK is that exactly what is allowed in recycling bins
Re:No, like, absolutely no. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No, like, absolutely no. (Score:4, Interesting)
https://pitchbook.com/profiles... [pitchbook.com]
$700,000 from an angel investor. They are thinking they can sucker a VC firm into dumping a few dozen million into it I imagine.
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I checked out their website to see what rationalization they had for making this a home product, instead a big machine for sorting and processing within a recycling center. Nothing. It's baffling, I can't figure out what they are thinking.
They want to sell you shit you don't need for a lot of money. Seems pretty standard.
The next step is to get them required by law. Then they can really make money and raise prices.
Re: No, like, absolutely no. (Score:2)
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Selling a hundred million small machines to individual households, especially if they can get subsidies and/or kickbacks, would be a cash cow.
And a recycling/e-waste nightmare.
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Easy enough. If you make big machines for recycling centres there's probably a market for what, five machines worldwide? But if you make them for rich suburbanites, well, now you're democratizing waste management sovereignty for a better tomorrow at scale. Like a real unicorn.
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They already are - there are plenty of machines being used by recyclers to sort through the recycling that comes in. And many are using artificial intelligence to do image recognition in order to recognize items.
Basically what happens first is general sorting of metal,
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This is a culture and regulation problem, not a "solve it with a gizmo" problem.
No, this is a "put a machine in a garbage truck or at a facility before the dump" problem so people don't have to deal with it. Home-owner sorting is rooted in early recycling when early adopters would have to take pre-separated trash to item specific facilities. That mentality needs to go away and this needs to get back to being close to "just throw it in a bin" so it's minimal to zero work for the home owner. In other words, place the labor on the other end and let experts determine what goes where.
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No, this is a "put a machine in a garbage truck or at a facility before the dump" problem so people don't have to deal with it. Home-owner sorting is rooted in early recycling when early adopters would have to take pre-separated trash to item specific facilities. That mentality needs to go away and this needs to get back to being close to "just throw it in a bin" so it's minimal to zero work for the home owner. In other words, place the labor on the other end and let experts determine what goes where.
All that's really required is for the consumer to separate recyclables from garbage. It's immeasurably harder for the infrastructure to separate, clean and process the recyclables if they're mixed in with greasy pizza boxes, chicken bones and coffee grinds. Most cities tell people not to put thin plastic bags in the recycling because they clog up the machinery.
And of course there need to be convenient places to drop the recyclable goods. Most big cities have a dual-bin strategy for single-family homes.
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All that's really required is for the consumer to separate recyclables from garbage.
And there are so many times where the consumer screws up the sorting because they aren't familiar with the nuances of what goes where, and if it can even be recycled. Facilities have actually opened which mine older landfills for resources, which already do what I describe above. This machine, placed at the end of the cycle, promises to do what I describe and has only been placed at the wrong end of the sorting process. And until a few decades ago, through the entirety of human history we collectively put w
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It's hard to see how anything like this wouldn't be more efficiently implemented as infrastructure rather than an appliance.
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Of course it is. Companies that sell products reliant on plastic don't want consumers thinking too hard about whether their purchase will introduce negative consequences.
Not the problem (Score:2)
Recycling isn't the problem we should be focusing on - we have a "reduce" & "reuse" problem.
See: Waste hierarchy [wikipedia.org]
Re: Not the problem (Score:2)
Re: Not the problem (Score:2)
Banning plastic in the food and beverage supply chain would eliminate most plastic waste in the developed world. Go back to glass milk/soda bottles and wax paper for meats. Glass can be recycled an unlimited number of times. https://www.theguardian.com/ne... [theguardian.com]
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Not only recycled, but glass bottles can be reused a lot. If the companies had a standardized set of glass containers, things would be smoother (empty containers get exchanged for full containers, no need to match the empty to same product. Machine vision can recognize damaged containers for recycling and route the rest for cleaning and reuse.
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You want standardization? What with their metric system and A4 paper [cam.ac.uk] and micro-USB [bbc.co.uk] and USB-C [bbc.com] ports, I bet the EU would come up with something if you asked them.
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When i was a kid my family of four produced about 1 bag of garbage a week, now, I end up with a bag every couple days, by myself, and its mostly packaging.
A large part of that is from buying packaged food as opposed to making everything from ingredients.
Not releasing another brick on obsolesce helps (Score:2)
Non fixable, internet "enabled" devices that are supposed to only last 1-2 years before you have to buy a new one are pretty much one of the worst pollution generating things we came up with.
Here's the first problem (Score:4, Interesting)
> some of the items people might just assume are recyclable â" say, plastic cutlery â" usually aren't.
If a product cannot be recycled and doesn't biodegrade, it should not be permitted to be produced in the first place.
If it can be recycled but recycling for that item is not an option in a particular market, then it should not be available for sale in that market.
If people won't pay to recycle - and they won't - then the cost needs to be baked into the product, rendered unto the government as a tax, and the government should oversee the recycling program. Because private companies will cheat.
And the above should include oil and oil products. When you're putting gas in your car, you should be funding not just your local road system, but also CO2 sequestering projects.
But we will only make a show of such things without getting serious about it, and landfills will continue to grow and our environment will continue to be contaminated. Because we externalize all the costs like that makes them disappear.
Re: Here's the first problem (Score:2)
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> some of the items people might just assume are recyclable â" say, plastic cutlery â" usually aren't.
If a product cannot be recycled and doesn't biodegrade, it should not be permitted to be produced in the first place.
Agreed. The key point is that there needs to be back-pressure in the system to force adaptation. For instance, recently many products have made their packaging more composite (like a plastic container with a different kind of plastic shrink-wrap around it, which you're supposed to remove before recycling). In a correctly-working system, they'd reduce net costs by designing the containers to be MORE recyclable, not less recyclable. They'd work to find a way to use FEWER different kinds of materials, rath
Single use (Score:4, Insightful)
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Is the device that you used to post this opinion recyclable? I think not.
Pretty well everything is recyclable. The only thing stopping it is economics, as for better or worse the foundation of modern society is the availability of money, and a return of actual money made by investing money in the first place.
"stored separately in a series of bins"... (Score:2)
As others pointed out already: The much much much better approach is to avoid unnecessary waste, and there is plenty of ways to do that, without adding yet another machine to end up in the "toxic waste" bin.
No (Score:2)
It uses way too much tech to solve the easy problem. The hard problem is figuring out how to efficiently recycle plastic into useable material
Why not put it in the landfill (Score:2)
This makes no sense. Nobody will pay $5000 for this unit.
Instead, make a bigger machine that does the same thing but with a lot more garbage. The garbage truck would dump the garbage in the machine at the landfill and the machine would extract the recyclable bits out of it. Since only one giant machine is needed per landfill, the budget per machine can be so much larger, economies of scale FTW.
Re: Why not put it in the landfill (Score:2)
Because people with more money than sense would rather you buy their trash handling version of the juicero
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Of course, this would still require that the initial discard sorts between 'clean' and 'dirty' trash. If mixed in with a bunch of greasy stuff, a lot of recyclable stuff is no longer viable to recycle.
Way to spend my money, .gov. (Score:4, Informative)
"it hopes incentives from local governments" In other words, They hope to take your tax dollars, and give it to people who buy these things so they can spend less of their money. No. Just no. If somebody wants to be lazy, Make them spend the $5,000. Dont take my money for this. Spend it more wisely.
Just DIY. Its not hard, people!
Rinse your recycling, throw your greasy pizza boxes in the trash, etc.
Blue states must mandate installation in new homes (Score:2)
Who wants to bet LASSO lobbyists won't be trying to force this on home builders?
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle (Score:2)
There is a reason that the words of that slogan are in that particular order - that is the order in which you are meant to be tackling the issue. Yet this proposed "solution" is tackling the last thing first.
And that's not even considering that in the US here is no standard definition of what is recyclable. What can be collected in one community may not be collected in another. And even if it is still collected, then it may be done differently. (Case in point at the last last location I lived at, glass
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I've said it before, and here's an opportunity to say it again: history has shown us unable to make much of a dent through "reduce". Go read about the energy conservation efforts during the Carter Administration in the US. Through massive efforts, we managed to eke out a few percent reduction in energy use.
Say you want to reduce how much of a consumable you use. With judicious care, perhaps you can get 5 or 10% more out of it. Maybe 25%, but you might need to give up a little on quality or comfort.
But "
Betteridge's Law (Score:2)
Yep, this is ridiculous. Hi, I'm a startup, please throw money at me!
As summed up by other posters, a quintessentially American non-solution, let's make an insanely expensive, complex Rube Goldberg machine and try to sell it to the tiny subset of the population that has an extra $5K lying around and wants to Save the Earth personally instead of just donating the $5K to someone who might pick plastic out of the oceans or something.
There's no taste for building the public infrastructure to properly support r
Tragedy of the commons (Score:2)
The problem of recycling is it corresponds to the tragedy of the commons. Why should I bother to spend my time, effort and money ($5000 upfront in this case) into recycling, if I am not getting anything back? However, if nobody recycles, we will all suffer the consequences in the future (even if we do...)
So yes, recycling is very important, but its costs should be somehow transferred to the end user, so he has a personal incentive to recycle. For example, the Pfand system [allaboutberlin.com] in Berlin adds a deposit to each bo
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The solution to any tragedy of the commons problem is collective action.
The problem is, cold war propaganda was too effective, and some societies now equate any sort of non-military collective action to OMG tyrannical communist fascism.
I thought you were a bit out of touch suggesting bottle deposits, but you're right: apparently most US states don't have them. It looks like even fewer states have deposits on lead-acid battery cores.
work it out (Score:2)
Recyclers are paid money to recycle, it's their fucking job.
If they can't do it, piss off.
If things can't be recycled don't make them.
They have to figure out new ways to recycle everything.
Stop bitching about what they can't do, work it out.
Re: work it out (Score:2)
Not good enough to pass tenders? (Score:2)
It's waste - it's axiomatically dirty. (Score:2)
If you're in the recycling industry and your industrial process can't handle dirty input then you're either delusional or simply taking a piss while taking government grants to boost your business. In either case you are not fit to be a director of any such company. It is waste and it will always be dirty. Stop your excuses and improve your process. I'm not going to be wasting time, money and water cleaning my waste just because you have unrealistic expectations.
No (Score:2)
Dumb and Dumber (Score:1)
Or, in other words, entrepreneur and investor.
Seriously, this has potential to trump Foodini in the level of stupidity. Most kitchen do not have space for this BS, and most families can come up with better ways to spend 5K.
Forging ahead to the past (Score:2)
$5K for a trash compactor? Pass. (Score:2)
This sort of garbage sorting device might make sense for a large condo tower or apartment, but it'll never work for the average single family house. And how much electrical power will it use? We're getting to the point when EVERY strain on the power grid needs to be closely scrutinized.
No. (Score:2)
Overlooked (Score:2)
Every comment here is about how stupid and doomed the Lasso is, and I completely agree on that point. Even ignoring that no one is going to spend 5 grand on a loud, bulky, slow, 30% effective (no paper, cardboard etc) recycling bin that your normal recycling collection you still have to pay for won't pick up; they are talking about forming their own network of collection pick-up trucks, or worse, it seems like they are leaning toward the uber model of gig-workers to do it with rented trailers and their own