How will robots change the Recycling Industry? | Ep 361
Channel: Robohub
Date: 2022-10-10

The Recycling Industry in the United States is a for-profit industry. They profit from taking recyclable material, refining it, and reselling it to companies at a cheaper price than producing the material from scratch.

If you look at the demand side of the recycling industry, an array of multi-billion dollar companies like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo are incentivized to buy recycled goods and reduce their materials costs.

If you look at the supply side, ~300 million tons of trash are generated annually in the United States. Estimates suggest that up to 75% of that is recyclable.

On paper, it seems clear that maximizing the amount of trash the US recycles is in everyone’s interest. One issue though, less than a third of the trash ends up recycled.

Areeb, co-founder of Glacier, breaks down the multi-layered reasoning behind why the Recycling industry cannot handle this volume of trash, and what Glacier is doing to address this.

0:00 Glacier takes on Recycling 
1:37 How does Recycling work?
5:06 Value Hierarchy of Materials
9:24 How much do we recycle?
10:59 Is the consumer at fault?
13:46 Why does everything go in one bin?
15:59 How much trash do we create?
18:24 What is Glaciers approach?
23:15 Glaciers' robot
28:00 Robot VS human
29:27 Computer Vision
32:21 Working with local MRF's
35:21 Competition
36:23 What's Next?