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00:00Every year, America throws away $6.5 billion worth of recyclable goods like paper, aluminum,
00:09and plastic.
00:11And the household recycling that gets mixed up in blue bins costs hundreds of millions
00:16of dollars to sort.
00:19That job can be dangerous.
00:21Things like dirty diapers, surfboards, televisions, even hand grenades come through fairly regularly.
00:29Now a growing number of companies have deployed AI and robotics to help make recycling safer
00:35and more efficient.
00:37Mattanya Horowitz, founder of the robotics company AMP, spent six years perfecting his
00:43trash handling robots.
00:45This little robot right over here, it's just a valve.
00:47It just uses a little piston and kind of flicks things off from the side.
00:51We went to AMP's biggest recycling plant in Cleveland, Ohio to see if AI can help fix
00:57The U.S. is one of the world's biggest waste producers, and only recycles about a third
01:06of its eligible trash.
01:08That's much lower than other countries like South Korea and Germany, which recycle more
01:12than half of their garbage.
01:15In America, waste management is a local issue.
01:18The country has over 9,000 different recycling programs, making it difficult to standardize
01:23at scale.
01:24As a result, U.S. recycling varies greatly by state.
01:28Today, California and Oregon have the highest residential recycling rates in the U.S. at
01:3437 percent, while Mississippi and Louisiana have the lowest, at 8 percent.
01:41For decades, the U.S. could rely on countries like China to buy mostly unprocessed trash.
01:47From 1992 to 2017, the U.S. exported $11 billion worth of recyclable waste to China, largely
01:54unsorted.
01:55But in 2017, China said it no longer wanted to import contaminated materials like plastics
02:02and paper products.
02:05As a result, U.S. facilities had fewer places to sell their recyclables, and many struggled
02:10to turn a profit.
02:12Facing steep costs, many sent their waste to landfills or incinerators.
02:18These challenges created an opportunity for robotics companies like AMP, which Matanya
02:23founded in 2014.
02:26There's value in the plastics, there's value in the aluminum, but the problem has been
02:30that you needed all of these manual sorters to pull that material out, and there's a lot
02:34of cost associated with that.
02:36And you're left with this kind of marginal business.
02:39At its start, AMP put its own trash-sorting robotics in other recycling facilities.
02:44In 2022, the company began operating its flagship facility in Cleveland, Ohio.
02:49This AMP-1 facility, as it's called, runs on AMP machinery and software.
02:54A big part of what we do is focused on making that automated, making it so people don't
02:58have to touch garbage, and also making it so that this technology can sort through dirtier
03:02and dirtier material streams, so you can require less of consumers and really have a solution
03:07that is pervasive.
03:10The facility gets its waste from plastic manufacturers and materials recovery facilities, or MRFs,
03:16that have earmarked these bales for landfill.
03:20For most of America's recyclables, this is their only chance to avoid being sent to the
03:24dump.
03:26Dozens of workers use specialized machines, like trommels and screens, to sort trash.
03:32MRFs can sort roughly 87% of the materials they receive.
03:36But workers can be exposed to sharp objects like used syringes and batteries or aerosol
03:41cans that can explode.
03:46This plant in Cleveland has 15 employees, and they rarely touch garbage.
03:51Instead, a fleet of cameras and air jets get the trash sorted.
03:57Kevin Papich's job is to make sure AMP's automated plants are running smoothly.
04:01We view this building as an entire robot.
04:05There's very little hands-on sortation that takes place in this facility.
04:09Obviously, we're maintaining the line, keeping the place orderly, and producing quality bales.
04:17Up to 10 trucks arrive daily, dropping off a total of about 200 tons of mixed recyclables.
04:23It all arrives in giant, 1,500-pound bales.
04:27Forklift operators drop them into a reducer, which breaks them apart with metal teeth.
04:31The material we get in this facility comes from the eastern half of the United States.
04:36We receive material as far away as Iowa and Alabama and Florida.
04:41Cliff, you copy?
04:43Cliff?
04:44Go for Cliff.
04:45Full line, start.
04:46Full line, start.
04:47Thank you, sir.
04:49After the bales are broken, they come through the sortation line.
04:53The first step is the ferrous offtake.
04:57A rotary magnet pulls iron-based metals off the line.
05:00We get baling wire, car parts, food cans, that sort of stuff.
05:05Next, air jets blow away paper scraps and flexible packaging, like the thin, clear plastic
05:11that's wrapped around food and toys.
05:14Amp's jets can sort thousands of recyclables a minute, more than 10 times the amount its
05:18robotic arms can.
05:21Any remaining materials travel along these belts, passing under cameras that ID and track
05:26them using Amp's custom-made, deep-learning neural network.
05:32This network uses multiple layers of nodes, like neurons in the human brain.
05:38These nodes work together to analyze patterns like textures and shapes to ID specific material.
05:45Amp scans more than 50 billion objects a year.
05:49The more it scans, the more it learns.
05:52We're focused on a system that you're not really programming so much as teaching.
05:56You can teach them how to identify number one plastics, even though they're smashed
05:59and folded and dirty and inconsistent, and with that, you essentially have a garbage
06:03sensor.
06:04And that garbage sensor is what the industry's been missing.
06:07Amp's system can also target specific materials and colors.
06:11We've had somebody come to us and say, hey, I didn't know you could sort color, can you
06:15give me just clear and natural polypropylene?
06:19And we were able to do that by just adjusting the neural net and giving them that fail.
06:25Because everything is tracked, the plant can detect problems on the line.
06:29So pretty much every corner of the facility is being monitored for quality, for contingencies,
06:33like is a jam forming?
06:35Is there material where it's not supposed to be?
06:37Eventually, Amp's trash gets to the recirculating line, a belt that moves missed material back
06:42into the sortation line.
06:44We're currently capturing 85 to 90 percent of all the product we send through the line.
06:50Once the materials are sorted, they fall into their own bunkers.
06:53From there, those bunkers are emptied and then moved to the baler operation, where we
06:58can actually bale each unique commodity and then it goes into finished goods for sale.
07:03Bales of recyclable plastics get more valuable the better they're sorted.
07:07The higher the purity, the higher the price.
07:09We're always geared up for 90 plus percent purity inside of our bales, and I think we
07:14hit that 100 percent of the time.
07:17Amp sells those bales to other recycling mills, which use them to make plastic bottles, aluminum
07:22cans, and car parts.
07:24The company also sells its tech to other recyclers.
07:28Today, its systems support nearly 100 facilities around the world.
07:34But Amp's machines can't ID every piece of trash.
07:37This is where AI still needs an assist from humans.
07:43Images of missed material are sent to a team of human annotators in India, who identify
07:48and label them in the neural net to train the AI.
07:52When annotators are going through that data, looking for mistakes, we are also always getting
07:57more specific about what we identify.
08:00So at first it was enough to say that this was a number one plastic, now we say, oh,
08:04we also want to know what color it is, what form factor it is, what brand it is.
08:10The company says its AI-trained machines and leaner workforce help make Amp Ones up to
08:1550 percent cheaper to run than traditional MRFs.
08:19It also runs an R&D lab in Denver, where the team studies information gathered by its
08:24hundreds of sorting devices around the world.
08:26They're all uploading data to this cloud infrastructure we built.
08:30We then have people go through that data set and say, here's what's number one plastics,
08:35here's aluminum cans, and everything else.
08:37Joe Castagnieri leads Amp's software development.
08:40The video feed is coming in, it's received in the computer, and we pass it through the
08:45brain of Amp's system, which is the neural network, which is looking at those images,
08:50trying to figure out what those things are.
08:53These green outlines are for natural high-density polyethylene.
08:57There's also an aluminum can under there.
09:02But making sure these computers work under real-life conditions is a challenge.
09:06You have to get it to work in a hot, dusty, trash-filled environment that's 80 degrees
09:12or 40 degrees.
09:14The company says it has buyers for all the waste that flows through the AmpOne facility
09:19in Cleveland, but it has trouble selling waste at some of its other facilities.
09:23The real challenge is, there are a lot of materials we can recycle where there isn't
09:29what we call an end market.
09:30There isn't somebody who will buy it and use it.
09:33Number one plastics that's colored, almost nobody wants.
09:36We can sort it out all day, nobody will buy it, and it means that we sort it out, and
09:39it just goes right to the landfill anyway.
09:42Part of the problem is that making new plastic is often cheaper than recycling it, especially
09:46when oil prices are low.
09:49Some U.S. states have passed extended producer responsibility laws, or EPRs, that hold manufacturers
09:55accountable for the waste they create.
09:58Right now, five U.S. states have passed EPR laws targeting packaging waste.
10:02Broadly, I think these rules are important and they're good, but I worry that people
10:07are going to think that incremental improvements are good enough.
10:12People should be aiming for doubling the diversion rates that they have now, and they should
10:15be aiming for it to do that in the next several years.
10:18And it's possible.
10:19It's possible with technology like ours, it's possible with other technology.
10:22For now, he's focused on growing Amp's facilities and getting its tech in more recycling centers
10:27around the world.
10:28If we can make recycling and waste management a more profitable business, we can make waste
10:33management infrastructure spread across the world more quickly, and we can stop having
10:37plastics in the ocean and things like that.
10:40So when you look at these huge global problems and you see how recycling can become a solution
10:44to them, it's very exciting and very motivating.
10:53The hardest part of the job, it is not the robots.