Despite good intentions to make changes that support the environment, companies are still sending items to the landfill that could otherwise be recycled. While the world is producing nearly twice as much plastic waste as it did two decades ago, just 9% of it is being properly recycled, according to a report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Glacier, a company that uses AI-enabled robots to help companies better handle the messy and tedious job of sorting through trash, is hoping to change that. The San Francisco-based company, which was founded by Rebecca Hu, a former Bain consultant, and Areeb Malik, a former Meta software engineer, says its robots can sift through 45 items per minute, including more than 30 different materials, to find items that are recyclable and might otherwise be missed by human detectors.
“Today, when you go into a facility that’s using a Glacier robot, you’ll see a conveyor belt, which typically exists in these facilities, and then the robot has two parts to it. The first is our AI vision system, and that’s literally a camera that’s taking 24/7 footage of all the items passing underneath it,” Hu says. “And then the robot has these arms that can know where to pick an item, and then it knows what that item is, so it knows where to actually sort it. In doing so, it’s able to automate that sortation process at a very high degree of accuracy.”
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