https://archive.vn/L2KIw
"At the Boulder County Recycling Center in Colorado, two team members spend all
day pulling items from a conveyor belt covered in junk collected from the
area’s bins. One plucks out juice cartons and plastic bottles that can be
reprocessed, while the other searches for contaminants in the stream of paper
products headed to a fiber mill. They are Sorty McSortface and Sir Sorts-a-Lot,
AI-powered robots that each resemble a supercharged mechanical arm from an
arcade claw machine. Developed by the tech start-up Amp Robotics, McSortface
and Sorts-a-Lot’s appendages dart down with the speed of long-beaked cranes
picking fish out of the water, suctioning up items they’ve been trained to
recognize.
Yes, even recycling has gotten tangled up in the AI revolution. Amp Robotics
has its tech in nearly 80 facilities across the U.S., according to a company
spokesperson, and in recent years, AI-powered sorting from companies such as
Bulk Handling Systems and MachineX has popped up in other recycling plants.
These robots are still niche, but they’re starting to be seen as a step forward
for an industry in need of real improvement. “I know it’s kind of a buzzword,”
says Jeff Snyder, the director of recycling at Rumpke Waste and Recycling, a
waste-management company based in Ohio. “But from an [industry] perspective, AI
is incredible. It’s a game changer for us.”
In the ChatGPT era, AI has been endlessly hyped as tech companies scramble to
profit off the recent surge of interest. But the technology’s impact on
recycling might be closer to the opposite: a meaningful application that is
hidden in plain sight. Even that might still not be enough to fully fix
recycling as we know it.
Recycling could use a high-tech shake-up. In theory, “materials recovery
facilities,” or MRFs—industry insiders pronounce the acronym as a word that
rhymes with
Smurfs—are supposed to close the loop between consumption and
production. They gather the containers and pieces of packaging we throw into
bins, do the dirty work of sorting them out, and then sell those materials back
to other companies that can reuse them."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
