The future of recycling is here, and of course, it involves robots and artificial intelligence.
Rebecca Hu, co-founder of robotics company Glacier, creates robots that help recycling plants separate and recycle materials.
Previously, sorting recyclable materials was a manual job that took hours to complete. Today, Glacier has been using AI cameras so robots can better identify recyclable materials. Hu said that training a robot to recognize materials is similar to teaching young children how to distinguish two things. “If you give them 100, 1,000, 1 million samples of aluminum cans, they get really good at pattern matching,” she told Found.
What other training has the robot received? no Pick it up. Mr. Hu tells us here that those thin plastic shopping bags are actually not recyclable. “It contaminates everything,” she said, adding that robots are trained to pull it out and return it to the landfill. This gave rise to the concept of “wish recycling,” the process by which someone throws something away without knowing exactly whether it belongs in the trash or recycling bin. Nonsense, these wish bikes are actually doing more harm than good, and if someone is on the fence about an item, it’s probably best to throw it in the trash.
Finally, the moment we’ve all been waiting for – Hu also tells us that these robots do have names. But you’ll have to listen to the episode to find out which famous female singer some of the robots are named after. Enjoy this episode!
