In a multipart series this week, Waste360 will examine some of the latest
technologies under development and the implications their adoption will have for
the industry at large.
The scene is like what you’d see in most any materials recycling facility
(MRF): A stream of recyclables comes barreling down a conveyer belt to be
separated and diverted to the proper processing areas before being baled and
shipped.
But what’s different here is it’s not just human eyes and hands operating
the sorting system. Instead, robotic arms dart quickly over the belt picking up
objects and tossing them into the right bunkers. The process is guided by
cameras and computers capable of quickly identifying and sorting materials and
objects of all sorts.
Elsewhere, an automated side-loader refuse and recycling truck completes
its route. It pulls up to a residence and an arm extends from the truck, grabs
the cart and dumps its contents into the back of the truck. Sitting at the
driver’s wheel is no one at all. The truck’s route has been programmed to allow
the truck to complete its route on its own.
These are not scenes of some far-flung future; these are technologies that
are being piloted and tested right now. The big questions facing the waste and
recycling industry include whether these technologies are viable and, if so,
what their implementation will mean for the industry’s sprawling workforce.
“Waste treatment, including MRFs, will be completely reshaped by the
evolution of artificial intelligence (AI), advanced sensors and robotics,” says
International Solid Waste Association President Antonis Mavropoulos. “At first,
it’s obvious that manual sorting will be completely wiped out, maybe in less
than five to six years. Second, powered by AI and new sensors, robots will be
able to separate much more fractions, with much less impurities. Third, the
separation process will become faster and more cost effective, with easy
adaptations to changes of the input waste.”
These technologies are just beginning to be tested in the waste industry
and other industries like trucking and manufacturing, but some companies have
already seen improvements in operations, safety and the quality of
materials.
In a multipart series this week, Waste360 will examine some of the latest
technologies under development and the implications their adoption will have for
the industry at large. Part One examines the use of robotics at MRFs. Part Two
will look at what’s happening with driverless trucks and the use of technology
to increase industry safety. And Part Three will talk about the long-term
implications of these trends.
Part One: Using Robotics to Increase Recycling Efficiency
In an effort to increase recycling efficiency and reduce contamination,
waste and recycling companies across the globe are starting to partner with
manufacturers to test out robotics and AI technologies for the sorting of
materials.
In late March, the Carton Council of North America joined forces with
Alpine Waste & Recycling and AMP Robotics to test the use of AI to improve
the recycling of food and beverage cartons. Alpine installed AMP Robotics’ AMP
Cortex robotic sorter in its facility to test out its sorting functionality. AMP
Cortex sorts materials via spider-like arms with grippers and utilizes
visible-light cameras to feed images to a computer that uses advanced machine
learning algorithms to recognize items on the facility’s conveyor belt. It
currently runs about 16 hours per day and has a grab rate of 60 picks per
minute, which is higher than a human’s average of 40 picks per minute.
“Right now, we are focused on getting the system to learn the materials
that are traveling underneath it,” says Brent Hildebrand, vice president of
recycling with Alpine Waste & Recycling. “It has been fun to watch how the
robot learns more materials and how it gets better at sorting the materials.
Long term, I think the robot will help efficiencies at facilities like ours.
Alpine is innovative when it comes to utilizing different technologies like this
one, and I hope that it will help our operations and other operations across the
country become more efficient at diverting more materials from landfill in the
future.”
One of the things that Alpine is looking at with the AMP Cortex is how it’s
compiling data of all the materials that are traveling underneath it. While the
company’s main focus right now is cartons, it hopes to receive some valuable
data about other materials once AMP Robotics makes the full data function
available.
“Even though the robot is only sorting one material right now, it’s
collecting data from every material that passes through it,” says AMP Robotics
Founder Matanya Horowitz. “In addition to acting as a sorter, the robot serves
as a continuous waste characterization. As the robot watches the waste stream,
it learns with experience and becomes smarter over time. As it becomes smarter,
the accuracies continue to go up and the sorting process continues to improve.
We are in the beginning stages of this robotic technology, but accuracies above
98 percent will soon become the standard with these robotics.”
Another notable partnership is between ZenRobotics and Recon Services Inc.,
which have come together to bring the ZenRobotics Recycler from Finland to the
U.S. The ZenRobotics Recycler, which is currently installed at Recon’s
construction and demolition (C&D) recycling facility in the U.S., reclaims
materials from waste via advanced machine learning technology, sorting materials
like metal, wood and stone fractions.
“Creating a computer capable of understanding a wide variety of materials
and objects that come in all shapes and sizes was challenging,” says ZenRobotics
CEO Timo Taalas. “After we tested the system in the lab and got it to work, it
took a lot of work to make it successful in the first production system and
other facilities after that. We now have a system that reads and scans the
material as it travels on the conveyor belt and uses robot arms to pick up
objects and place them into sorting bunkers, but I think people often
underestimate the time it takes from the first marketing video to pushing it
through to full production. We learned that the hard way.”
In addition to its launch in the U.S., ZenRobotics is partnering with
Jiangsu LVHE Environmental Technology Co., Ltd., on the first robotic C&D
waste recycling facility in China. The first units, which aim to help reduce the
country’s massive quantities multiple waste categories, are scheduled to be
installed this summer.
Taalas believes that robotic technology will make a big change in MRFs
because robots are built for heavy 24/7 operations, and they are good at sorting
multiple waste fractions in one spot, which makes the cost of installation
lower. He also notes that since robots are software controlled, they provide a
great amount of flexibility.
For example, if you configure a MRF to sort wood, metal and concrete
fractions when you first install the device, you can easily reconfigure it to
sort plastic, A-grade wood, B-grade wood, metal and concrete six months later.
This flexibility is important to MRF operators because factors like material
prices and legislation change over time.
“Robots create high-quality, pure recyclable material and make it possible
to recycle materials that may not have been able to be recycled in the past,”
comments Taalas.
Bulk Handling Systems (BHS) is the latest manufacturer to create a robotic
sorting technology. Max-AI technology, an artificial intelligence that
identifies recyclables and other items for recovery, has two immediate
solutions: the Max-AI Vision System and the Max-AI Autonomous Quality Control
(AQC) unit. The vision system provides information, and the AQC unit adds a
robotic sorter to pick out and place up to six different materials from the
conveyor belt into sorting chutes.
Max-AI is in operation at Athens Services’ MRF in Sun Valley, Calif., where
it’s helping to identify and separate polyethylene terephthalate (PET), leaving
a clean stream of clear PET on the conveyor belt.
“Athens is using Max-AI to remove PET thermoform trays from recovered PET,
which provides the company with a significant improvement in its sale price for
PET bales,” says BHS Director of Product Management Brian Wells. “Compared to
its previous manual sorting, Max-AI is providing Athens with cleaner bales of
material and is able to sustain that performance through every hour of each
shift. Within a few days of commissioning, Max-AI was already achieving higher
quality than the MRF had been capable of producing previously.”
The Max-AI technology is part of BHS’ plan to bring autonomous optimization
to other MRFs in the near future to increase performance and profitability.
“As we launch additional products from the Max-AI platform, MRFs will
become more and more autonomous,” says Wells. “In the near future, you will see
us building container lines with no human sorters, and that’s going to evolve
into a new generation of recycling plants that won’t require any human contact
with waste. These AI-enabled plants will be able to operate around the clock
without stopping for employee breaks, which will significantly increase
recycling capacity while offering our customers a safer and more consistent
production operation.”
Knowing the needs and wants of the industry, robotic technology
manufacturers are working to make detection and sorting of dangerous objects a
reality.
“We are hoping to have robots detect dangerous objects like roadkill,
diapers and needles and provide warnings for the human sorters,” says Horowitz.
“It’s not a feature yet, but we hope to make it one in the future to further
improve safety in the workplace.”