Waste Robotics, a Canadian company based in Trois-Rivières that develops and markets autonomous robots for sorting centers, has raised CAD $10 million from Mirova and Fondaction. This investment aims to accelerate the company’s commercial development and strengthen its presence in Europe – particularly in France and the U.K. – and in North America.
Waste Robotics offers a solution for intelligent sorting by bringing together waste recognition technology, deep-learning algorithms, and robotic technologies to enable recycling centers to improve the quality of sorted flows and increase safety and profitability in their management of reusable materials. Waste Robotics wants to make sorting centers virtually autonomous due to A.I. technologies. The company’s ambition is also to contribute to upgrading the work of sorters, who will move towards less dangerous, higher value-added tasks.
Waste production continues to rise worldwide. Experts estimate that it will rise by around 70 percent by 2050, to 3.4 billion tons. Improving sorting processes and technologies is a major challenge at a time when 80 percent of the world’s waste is still landfilled or abandoned and when developed countries are facing increasing regulatory pressure to take action in this area. The market for sorting robots is in a prime position to meet these multiple challenges.