by MAURA KELLER
More and more of today’s material recovery facilities and recycling plants are turning to robotic technology in their processes and procedures.
Not only do robotics offer a streamlined method of sorting and separating recycled materials, this technology helps focus the economics of the recycling industry to be more sustainable, economic and scalable.
For plastics recycling, the addition of AI and robotics technology is bringing consistency to plastics recycling operations, helping an area of the facility that was always challenging to staff, given the arduous nature of these jobs, run autonomously. For example, AMP Robotics offers its AMP Cortex robotic system, which can reach 80 picks per minute for faster and more precise plastic recovery. The program allows end used to separate plastics, and distinguish between PET, HDPE, LDPE, polypropylene (PP) and polystyrene (PS) at accuracy rates up to 98 percent.
Carling Spelhaug, senior PR and marketing communications manager at AMP Robotics, said this robotics technology is helping plastic reclaimers increase both capture rates and quality in the material they recover. In fact, one of the nation’s leading reclaimers, Evergreen, is using AI-guided robotics to separate plastics more precisely by color.
Working with AMP, Evergreen added AI-enable robotics to its PET bottle sort lines to modernize a critical portion of the company’s recycling process. These robots, supplied by AMP Robotics, replaced tedious hand sorting and accelerated the process. The robots are as accurate as they are fast. They pull and sort by color every bottle that runs through the recycling lines.
“With robots, the reclaimer has seen pick rates as high as 120 bottles per minute – an increase of up to 200 percent,” Spelhaug said. “The robots are removing up to 90 percent of contamination, on average, across Evergreen’s different lines.”
Robots can adapt very quickly to changes in the material stream, offering an attractive alternative to time-consuming training with human sorters to absorb changes.
“After installing robots, Evergreen was able to cross-train members of its team and move some to more technical or high-skilled roles within the plant,” Spelhaug said. “The industry is adopting this technology at a rapid pace and we’re seeing many repeat orders. The results have been compelling enough that Evergreen decided to move forward with six additional AMP Cortex robots for its recently acquired PET recycling facility in Riverside, California.”
David Reid, sales director at the Vem Group, a manufacturer of plastic injection molds, said a significant issue within the realm of plastics recycling is sorting, resulting from consumers who don’t pre-sort their products and dump everything in the same waste receptacle as the rest of the garbage. To tackle this underlying issue, robotics was introduced.
“The utilization of a robot sorting plant has several benefits over other methods,” Reid said. “First and foremost, robot sorting produces pure and clean fractions; this improves the ultimate treatment of materials – regardless of whether the trash is recycled or used for energy recovery. Robots raise the pace of recycling while improving the quality of the fractions that will be utilized to create new goods. The robotics technology also provides a much clearer image of the garbage gathered while streamlining the recycling plant’s activities.”
Evolution Of Sorts
Director of recycling at Waste Connections, Dan Kurtz said at Waste Connections, the company’s first core value is the safety of their employees. By augmenting their workforce with a fleet of recycling robots, Waste Connections has made the company a safer place to work.
“Currently, we are deploying robots in primary and secondary – quality control – sorting positions,” Kurtz said. “Specifically for plastic sorting, in both primary and secondary sorting positions, we find they perform as good or better than human sorters on pick counts based on average picks per minute. Additionally, while robots need basic routine maintenance, such as cup replacements and cleanings, they never get tired and always show up for work.”
Evolution is one of the core advantages of using vision-based detection technology, commonly referenced as the Artificial Intelligence (AI) portion of the recycling robot package. As Kurtz explained, it learns and evolves every day and flexes with new products from manufacturers simply by updating its reference catalogue.
“Once this is done, it sends updates to the fleet of robots, minimizing product loss. We see the robot AI technology, or the vision-detection system, being integrated into plant operating controls to help detect hazards, contamination and production issues before they become issues for our employees, impact material quality, or damage equipment,” Kurtz said. “We also see AI technology helping us automate many of the plant control activities by identifying problems and opportunities.”
In general, adopting robotics for plastics recycling means the technology will help make the industry safer by taking the employees out of high-risk positions, such as sorting. In addition, it will also help stabilize hard-to-fill plant positions in a very competitive labor market.
“The technology will help the recycling business model become more sustainable by mitigating labor costs and improving quality and productivity,” Kurtz said.
Benefits aside, robotics within the recycling industry come with some challenges, including around the quality of the waste stream.
As Kurtz explained, contaminated recycling streams affect all aspects of plant operations and create unsafe working conditions for all of Waste Connections’ employees.
“Too much of any type of non-conforming material in the recycling stream creates additional items to be sorted, damages equipment, increases the cost of processing, and forces MRFs to spend valuable sorting resources – mechanical, robotic, optical, human, etc. – on items that create no value, versus accomplishing our goal to keep valuable, recoverable resources out of the landfill,” Kurtz said.
Future Advancements
AI-guided robotics continue to improve, bringing increasingly greater accuracy, precision and speed to the sorting process and addressing ongoing labor challenges within the industry. As Spelhaug explained, this technology is helping plastic reclaimers and recyclers meet the swelling demand for high-quality recycled feedstock from brands and producers to incorporate into new packaging.
“Businesses that have adopted this technology and incorporated it into their sorting process are well positioned for the future, as this trend is here to stay,” Spelhaug said.
For example, AMP’s AI platform, called AMP Neuron, has created the largest known real-world dataset of recyclable materials for machine learning. This means that AMP can classify more than 100 different characteristics of recycling, including plastic single-stream recycling as well as construction and demolition debris, and e-waste. This combination of scalable accuracy and classification will further help materials recovery facilities (MRFs) optimize their operations.
Kurtz added that the robotic technology being used within the industry will continue to improve over time by becoming faster at detection, and better at capturing and providing accurate, real-time business intelligence.
“Waste Connections has embraced this new and evolving technology, and supports the manufacturers of this technology,” Kurtz said. “We see this technology as transformative to the industry and look forward to seeing its use flourish, but believe it is just one facet of new technology and MRF design that will make future MRFs more efficient and safe. If you are considering using the robots in your plants, have a realistic expectation of their performance. They work well in single layer primary sorting applications, or as quality control after an optical Sorter, and will need daily attention to continue running at peak performance.”
Reid added that advancements in AI technology can further help alter how waste and recycling is screened and sorted. It can be used for several things ranging from detecting dangerous items that might harm equipment to discovering metrics that can enhance working habits.
“This revolutionary technology is not only good for the environment but is also cost-effective,” Reid said. “It is wise to say that advancements in this field will make the plastic waste recycling industry more efficient and eco-friendly.”
Published in the February 2022 Edition