Here's a fact that may strike you as bonkers: The complex where I live in a beach city adjacent to Los Angeles doesn't offer tenants a waste recycling option. For we steadfast few who insist on separating our plastics and papers, the only option is a trip to a local recycling center.
But I'm hardly alone. Turns out tens of millions of Americans don't have easy access to waste recycling programs. With recent news that China, which has been doing the lion's share of our recycling for decades, will no longer be accepting waste from the U.S., it's possible millions more will lose the service.
Worse still, recycling has never been all that efficient. "When the U.S. was sending much of its paper and plastic trash to China, for more than two decades, the bales were often so poorly sorted that they contained garbage," writes Adele Peters in a recent Fast Company piece. "The system never extracted the full value from those materials."
Robots, it turns out, could be a big part of the solution by upending the broken economics of recycling, which is why we started offshoring the job to China in the first place. Researchers at MIT/CSAIL, for example, have developed a robotic platform that can sort various items by touch. It uses sensors in its hands to determine the size and texture of waste materials like paper, plastic, and metal, and it sorts accordingly.
Another company, ZenRobotics, combines data from multiple sensors along a waste stream to create an accurate real-time analysis. The robots use the sensor data to make autonomous decisions on how to grasp and sort objects.
AMP Robotics is another example of a company combining robotics, machine vision, and AI to make recycling faster and cheaper, raising the possibility that we can onshore our waste disposal.