Why The United States Is Turning To Recycling Robots

[Music] if you're like many Americans you throw your plastic water bottle into the blue bin with the expectation that it will be recycled but that's not always the case for decades the United States and other wealthy countries have been dependent on China to buy and process almost half of the world's plastic waste now stricter recycling standards in China mean it's cheaper for some US cities to simply send recyclables to the dump rather than pay a higher fee to process them that's why a number of researchers and tech companies are working on making US recycling more efficient what we've done is developed this vision system it's able to learn from experience and it's able to identify all these different bottles and cans despite them being smashed folded torn dirty kind of you know every way they can kind of get gross it's like your recycling bin you name it we can probably sort it out our gripper has two fingers and it kind of reaches down in grass and on each finger there's a strain sensor which measures how much the the finger is changing length and there's also a pressure sensor right at the the grasping portion based on how these sensors are constructed they also can tell metal objects because it changes was the electric field that it's measuring so with all of those three combined we came up with like a classification model to determine paper plastic and metal before we get into how high-tech robots can help us recycle it's important to understand why we started recycling in the first place and how that process is done today during World War two Americans were encouraged to collect and recycle paper tin cans rubber and kitchen fat which was used to make explosives as part of salvaged drives but with the end of the war people's interest in recycling faded and big landfills became the norm it wasn't until about the early 1970s that a new awareness of environmental issues arose with the celebration of the first Earth Day in 1987 New Jersey implemented the nation's first mandatory recycling law that same year a garbage barge named Marlboro 4,000 spent months on the ocean looking for a place to dispose of its 3000 pounds of garbage The Bard eventually returned to Brooklyn where the trash was incinerated the incident garnered lots of media attention and awoke Americans to the need for recycling the u.s. went from recycling 16 percent of its waste in 1990 it's over 34 percent by 2015 today many of our recyclables still end up in the landfill and at least part of the reason for that can be attributed to the way that our recycling industry works that's because a large share of the recycling and waste management in the United States is handled by private companies who are paid by cities often these large waste management companies are in charge of both recycling and landfill the fact is that these companies make 60 70 % profit from landfilling and incineration and hauling whereas with recycling they make very little money sometimes they lose money so it's a direct conflict of interest to have these monopolized companies in charge of recycling waste management is the largest trash processing and recycling company in North America while the company concedes that trash collection is its biggest profit ER waste management says it's committed to recycling for us there's always more value in that material to be able to recycle it as opposed to putting in the landfill and even from a investor point of view historically over the last decade the return on capital for the investments in recycling has been much better than the landfills landfills are very expensive to operate from a capital perspective so we'd much rather see that material end up in the recycling facility turned into another renewable item we've get over a billion dollars invested in the recycling infrastructure in the United States the last two years we've invested over a hundred million dollars in recycling assets even in very low commodity price condition here's how it works when waste management companies enter into contracts with the city they agree to split some of the profits that they get from selling the raw recycled materials say cardboard sells for $100 a ton the company gets to keep 25% and the city gets 75% but when the sale price of recycled cardboard Falls the company still has to give the city at 75% cut and may actually lose money because the cost of processing the cardboard remains the same so to recoup its losses the waste management company has to raise the cost of recycling for cities some cities who can't afford the higher prices I like to just send everything to a landfill waste management has had to change a business model on recycling where we now charge our inbound customers whether that's a municipality or a commercial customer a processing fee first what this does is it ensures that our shareholders can make a good return on their investment and that we can continue to invest in recycling infrastructure in the United States all of these different materials whether they're paper or plastic or whatever they actually have a lot of value the trouble is is that basically the cost of sorting the challenges of getting these materials really separated out erodes away a lot of that value this is where China came in the dependence upon China for our recyclables developed after around the year 2000 and that's because before then virtually all cities were using dual stream recycling with the inception of single stream recycling after let's say the year 2000 the quality of recycled materials in the United States deteriorated because of contamination unlike dual stream recycling single stream recycling allows residents to put all of their recyclables into one bin instead of having to separate paper from plastic metal and glass while single-stream recycling is more convenient for residents and cheaper for waste management companies to collect it deteriorates the quality of the recycled materials contamination in the context of recycling occurs when non recyclable items are mixed with recyclable items or when recyclable items are placed in the wrong bins items can also be contaminated if they have food stains like say a greasy pizza box for about 15 years this didn't matter because China was importing this material willy-nilly because they were desperate to get these raw materials into their industrial system so they accepted our dirty contaminated recyclables but that all ended in 2018 when China introduced a policy that banned most foreign recyclables in an effort to tackle the country's own environmental issues China's National stored policy set a very strict contamination rate of 0.5 percent the new standard made it very difficult for the u.s. Descendants recyclables to China during the first 4 months of 2017 to the same period last year US plastic scrap exports to China plummeted by 92 percent while exports of alloys decreased by 53 percent and exports of paper decreased by 37 percent the impact of the Chinese market or Chinese import restrictions has driven the demand for greater and greater quality out of processing facilities but it's also directed materials to new markets other countries including India Thailand and Malaysia have stepped up to fill the void left by China's new policy but even these countries are now pushing back on the massive amounts of recyclables ending up at their borders the result of all of this has been in the last year the large processing systems had to add workers and they had to add electronic equipment sorting equipment and this resulted in literally a doubling of the price of processing recyclables in the United States from about more than double it was about $55 a ton it's now about 120 dollars a ton on the East Coast Washington DC is paying twice as much to recycle as they pay to get rid of waste according to data from the trade group national waste and recycling Association the price of mixed paper fell from 32 dollars per ton to four dollars and 69 cents per ton from December 2017 to December 2018 all of these different materials whether they're paper or plastic or whatever they actually have a lot of value the trouble is is that basically the cost of sorting the challenges of getting these materials really separated out the roads away a lot of that value and so if you could use new technology to efficiently separate it you kind of unlock the value of this material stream and you know that helps you know boost the recycling industry increasing the quality the material can have improved the resale values sometimes pretty significantly it can be a 2x or 3x difference in some cases or more the requirements have become quite strict and so our technology helps them both control their sorting manpower and also produce material of higher quality than they're able to produce today this is why researchers and companies alike are working on high-tech solutions to tackle or recycling limitations leading the charge to increase the u.s. recycling rate is San Francisco which diverts about 80% of its waste from landfill the city has an exclusive partnership with waste management company Recology the ultimate goal here in San Francisco is to be the first city in the United States a reach zero waste and the waste we define zero waste in San Francisco is nothing to landfill and nothing to incineration San Francisco's recycle center is a two hundred thousand square foot facility that can process 40 to 45 tons of materials per hour a lot of the sorting is already automated we use everything from very simple like you would started to say human power to start material but then we use things like a star screen and a star screen is a series of concentric metal disks and they spin around and the paper actually floats up because it's lighter and the screen push the paper up while the containers fall down we use magnets to capture metal and then we also use what's called an eddy current magnet on the container line and that repels aluminum so I'd actually shoe the aluminum off of the conveyor belt and keeps that material separate and then we go all the way to high-tech state-of-the-art optical sorting machines that use light to determine the composition of the different plastic that's coming across the belt and then uses ballistic air to shoot those materials into different containers the Simms municipal facility in Brooklyn is the primary processing facility for curbside recyclables collected in New York City the site process about 20,000 tons of materials per month and like recycle center in San Francisco is highly automated but sorting is still not perfect one significant challenge or limitation today in the OP in the sorting equipment we use is optical stores which is how we separate plastics cannot see black plastics and near-infrared light cannot detect black plastic another challenge for vision based sorters is figuring out the material of objects that look really similar like Starbucks cups which can be paper or plastic the current recycling robots are all based on vision so especially as more reusable plastic versions of normally paper things come about it can be really easy to get confused between things Lily chin is a second-year PhD student at MIT computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory in Boston our collaboration with the team from Yale chin and her colleagues have developed a robot called raw cycle that uses tacit i/o sensors to determine if an object is paper metal or plastic on each finger there's a strain sensor which measures how much the the finger is changing length and there's also a pressure sensor right at the the grasping portion based on how these sensors are constructed they also can tell metal objects because it changes with the electric field that it's measuring so with all of those three combined we came up with like a classification model to determine paper plastic and metal MIT system is still in its early dates Rho cycle is 85% accurate when the materials are stationary but only about 63 percent accurate when the recyclables are moving on a conveyor belt chin says her team plans to add cameras to the system to improve its performance where I see the system really coming in is that before it gets to a recycling facility if like on an apartment or a campus level we can sort of keep the convenience of single-stream recycling but having the robot it's pre sorted into the multi-stream so we can have lower contamination levels but also have the convenience so people will continue recycling amber bot X is taking a bit of a different approach vamp robotics what we're doing is developing artificial intelligence and robotics solutions to some of the primary challenges that recycling industry faces today these facilities have major problems around both the sorting of all these different commodities and also achieving high purities for the materials that they sort out and then sell one of these big challenges in the recycling industry the issue with basically the changing material stream so even beyond introducing new packaging consumer habits have changed quite a bit over the last several decades a lot of recycling facilities were built around the idea that you'd have a lot of newspaper coming in to them now that's replaced with a lot of cardboard so think of Amazon boxes and stuff like that other issues around packaging where that might have multiple layers of plastic or multiple layers of metals inside of them those can also be difficult for these facilities to manage what's cool about the artificial intelligence technology is that you can teach it to identify pretty much anything that a person can learn to identify so what this technology provides is a lot of flexibility for the facilities and they can process material in the way they want to and then the ability to adapt over time since these robots are really a platform that improve and and gain new capabilities over time they learn about these new materials and then you can you know assign them to sort those those materials out in addition to sorting municipal waste and probiotics software can also handle electronic waste and construction waste the company has already installed its software on over one dozen robots and recycling facilities in North America Finland basis and robotics and Oregon based bulk handling systems are also making AI recycling robots while recycling facilities have been able to find many domestic markets for their materials they're still investing in new technology for the future we just did an 11 million dollar upgrade here after 16 years of running this plant and we're putting another three million in this year in the hi-tech optical sorters and robotics in late 2017 we install their first robot in a recycling facility and now we have about four robots that we've been testing and by the end of 2019 we'll have eight robotics in our recycling facilities despite the initial stress on the recycling industry salman says china's regulation is good for the u.s. in the long run the trend is very clear that new companies new processes in the united states are within a few years going to take the place of all the materials that are going to china this does not mean that americans will not be sending good clean and raw materials around the world to companies placed in another continents that will continue but it will be a better system because what's coming out of the united states is much cleaner but perhaps the best solution to our recycling problem is just to make sure that recycling remains the third are reduce and reuse so that you don't have to recycle [Music] you you

Channel: CNBC

Views: 1,966,069

Rating: 4.8596964 out of 5

Keywords: CNBC, business, news, finance stock, stock market, news channel, news station, breaking news, us news, world news, cable, cable news, finance news, money, money tips, financial news, Stock market news, stocks, classic footage, retro footage, recycling robots, recyling china, how does recycling work, can I recycle, where does recycling go, what can I recycle

Id: 1mxaN_xqQh4

Length: 16min 4sec (964 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 20 2019

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[u/coltraneUFC]

A lot of recycling used to be sold to China and now they don't want it anymore. I saw a video of someone dumping Australian recycling in Malaysia.