How AI can help expedite waste disposal and recycling

There is a lot of garbage in the world.

About 2.24 billion tons of solid waste was generated in 2020, according to the World Bank. That figure is likely to rise by 73% to 3.88 billion tonnes by 2050.

Plastic is especially problematic. A study from the University of Georgia and the University of California estimated that by 2015, more than 8.3 billion tons of plastic waste had been generated since the material’s large-scale production began in the 1950s.

Anyone who doesn’t find these statistics surprising is Michela Druckmann. As the founder of Greyparrot, a British startup that developed her AI system designed to analyze waste treatment and recycling facilities, she has spent a lot of time looking at what we throw away. I was.

“One facility can literally dump mountains of waste in a day, and what’s really shocking and surprising is that it never stops,” she says. No holidays are wasted, they just come. ”

Greyparrot has installed cameras above conveyor belts at about 50 waste and recycling facilities in Europe and uses AI software to analyze what passes through in real time.

AI technology has advanced by leaps and bounds in the past year, and its image processing capabilities have become very sophisticated. But Ms Druckmann said training the system to recognize trash was still difficult, she said.

“A product like a Coke bottle, once in the trash, crumples, crushes and gets dirty, which further complicates the problem from an AI perspective.”

Greyparrot’s system currently tracks 32 billion pieces of waste annually, and the company is building a huge digital map of waste. This information can not only be used by waste managers to improve operational efficiency, but can also be shared more broadly.

“Regulators are now better able to understand what is going on with the material and which ones are problematic, which is also influencing packaging design,” says Druckmann.

“We talk about climate change and waste management as separate things, but in reality they are interrelated because most of the reasons we use resources are actually recovering them. Because you haven’t.

“Having stricter rules that change how we consume and how we design packaging would have a huge impact on the value chain and how we use resources.”

She hopes that big brands and other manufacturers will start using the data generated by companies like GreyParrot, ultimately designing more reusable products.

Troy Swope runs a company that is passionate about making better packaging. Footprint worked with supermarkets and Gillette to replace plastic razor trays with plant-based fiber ones.

In a blog post on Footprint’s website, Mr. Swope argues that consumers are misled by the “recycling myth.”

He mentioned a plastic salad container labeled “recyclable” and asked what that actually meant.

“Discarded single-use plastic is less likely than ever to end up outside of landfills,” Swope wrote. “The only way out of the plastic crisis is to stop relying on plastic in the first place.”

So-called greenwashing is a big problem, Druckmann said. “I have seen a lot of claims about eco and green packaging, but they are sometimes not backed up by actual facts and can be very confusing to consumers,” she said.

To let retailers know how much of their used plastic bottles are actually being recycled, British company Polytag covers plastic bottles with ultraviolet (UV) tags that are invisible to the human eye.

The tags are then read by a polytag machine when the bottles arrive at designated recycling plants. The bottle count is uploaded in real time to a cloud-based app, which Polytag’s customers can access.

“We can see exactly how many bottles are being recycled, which these brands have never had access to before,” said Rosa Knox Bradley, Project Manager at Polytag.

The company has previously worked with UK retailers Co-Op and Ocado.

To make it easier for people to recycle and even encourage them to do so, the UK government and Welsh and Northern Ireland administrations plan to launch deposit refund schemes in 2025.

This means that “reverse vending machines” will be installed in stores and other public areas, where people can deposit used plastic bottles and metal beverage cans for a price of about You will be able to receive a payment of 20 pence.

Finding environmentally friendly ways to dispose of waste remains a tough race, but every year a new trend emerges that throws in the spanner.

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The latest is addiction to e-cigarettes, or vape, creating a whole new pile of e-waste that is difficult to recycle.

“It’s a big problem, and it’s getting bigger,” said Ray Parmenter, director of policy and technology at the Chartered Waste Management Institute.

He added that the “fundamental problem” was single-use, single-use e-cigarettes, which are “basically an abomination to the circular economy.”

Single-use e-cigarettes are made from a variety of materials, including plastic, metal, and lithium batteries, and some come with LED lights and microprocessors.

In the UK alone, 1.3 million e-cigarettes are thrown away every week, according to a study last year by Material Focus, an organization that promotes recycling of electronics. That means about 10 tons of lithium is dumped into landfills each year, which he said is enough to power 1,200 car batteries.

“Vital raw materials like lithium come from deep mines, which are not the easiest to access, so once you get them out, you have to make the most of them,” Parmenter said. To tell.

Vaping is a great example of how we need to change the way we think, Druckmann said.

“It doesn’t make sense economically. It doesn’t make sense at all. Instead of asking how we recycle, ask why we have single-use e-cigarettes in the first place.”

Industry and policy makers have a big role to play in making products more recyclable or reusable, but so do consumers, she added. And the biggest change they can make is to consume less.