"Rebecca Hu-Thrams, co-founder and CEO of Glacier, is deploying AI-powered robotic sorters at material recovery facilities (MRFs) across the country, processing recycling for one in 10 Americans. Her robots use computer vision trained on more than 3 billion images of waste to identify and sort over 70 different materials-picking 45 items per minute, 24/7, in conditions that would exhaust or injure human workers."
"But Glacier's robots do more than sort. They create an intelligence layer for the circular economy, generating data about what's actually in the waste stream-down to specific brands and packaging designs. Amazon, which has invested in Glacier through its Climate Pledge fund, is using this data to understand what design features make packaging easier or harder for AI to detect, moving from "technically recyclable" to "provably recyclable.""
A $2 trillion circular economy depends on capturing recyclable materials already flowing through recycling facilities. AI-powered robotic sorters are deployed at material recovery facilities processing recycling for roughly one in ten Americans. Those robots use computer vision trained on more than three billion waste images to identify over 70 material types and pick 45 items per minute around the clock. Outdated sorting technology and a severe labor crisis leave as much as 80% of blue‑bin material unrecycled and expose workers to high injury rates. Site data from AI revealed PET losses; adding a single sorter cut PET-to-landfill by two-thirds and generated $138,000 annually. The robots also generate granular data on brands and packaging to help design packaging that is provably recyclable.
Read at Earth911
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