The recycling industry is not what you think. Here’s how we fix it | Hard Reset Podcast Episode #13
How much of our recycling actually gets recycled? Robots could help boost the percentage of recycled trash with near-perfect accuracy.
Listen on Spotify ► https://open.spotify.com/show/1vmm4a8kiPYEizw1dUkqq2
Listen on Apple ► https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hard-reset-podcast/id1697504258
Listen on Pandora ► https://www.pandora.com/podcast/hard-reset-podcast/PC:1001075656
Listen on Google Podcasts ► http://bit.ly/hard-reset-podcast
Watch the original episode on AMP Robotics here ► https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjv_wDOblfc/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=youtube_description
An estimated 32% of the recycling we send off to sorting centers actually gets recycled. Why is this? The nature of sorting recycling by hand is time consuming, messy, and dangerous, and the human error involved in this process is enormous.
Enter AMP Robotics, a Denver-based company training neural networks to speed through sorting plastic and paper with 99% accuracy by recognizing materials on a moving belt.
This robotic tech could usher in a new era of sustainability, allowing us to better sort recycling in order to reuse the same items that were once fated for the landfill.
00:00 Welcome to the Hard Reset Podcast
00:54 What makes this tech a Hard Reset?
06:08 What could make this fully a Hard Reset, rather than just an incremental change?
06:40 How do people get involved in improving the process?
12:10 What is the innovation that allowed this tech to be developed?
15:28 Where is Amazon within the recycling process?
19:26 How does AMP Robotics sell this tech?
21:18 Can the AMP robot be fooled?
35:00 What was the audience response to this episode?
39:00 What were the meanest comments we got on this episode?
Watch on Freethink.com ► https://www.freethink.com/series/hard-reset-podcast/robot-recycling/
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Read more of our stories on recycling:
New lithium recycling method is cleaner and cheaper
►https://www.freethink.com/energy/lithium-recycling/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=youtube_description
Batteries made from recycled metal coming to US
►https://www.freethink.com/energy/lithium-ion-batteries/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=youtube_description
New process could make plastic recycling more profitable
►https://www.freethink.com/energy/plastic-recycling/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=youtube_description
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Watch our original series:
► Hard Reset: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXthoedLVIdLvnNgiCshQvqKdS7T_qeGY
► Future of Cities: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXthoedLVIdKmJIGkk4zT4uno3ZSDqvPV
► Just Might Work: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXthoedLVIdIS7K-6oNkrya-v-k-X4zYI
► Challengers: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXthoedLVIdKeeuwpDPSyHSC54obntRxB
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About Freethink
No politics, no gossip, no cynics. At Freethink, we believe the daily news should inspire people to build a better world. While most media is fueled by toxic politics and negativity, we focus on solutions: the smartest people, the biggest ideas, and the most ground breaking technology shaping our future.
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HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA "does that describe you?" AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Tesla bot with the AMP sortation software will be a game changer 👏 👌 🙌
Love it. Keep having interesting conversations about problem solving through innovation. They aren't perfect but that's okay, progress is iterative.
Wall-eee 😅😅😅😅😅
@9:46: “peoples time is more valid than robots time”
Is it really? Think about a robot replacing both the person separating the waste at home and the person sorting all the different plastic material from that “Plastic here” bin collection. These robots are used for 2 reasons.
– They are (hopefully) more effective and accurate
– They are more cost efficient
How is the time those two people have at hand because they are either not sorting at all at home or do not have the sorting job at the recycling facility valued?
If they have a job that pays more than the costs of recycling or what they earned at the recycling belt – fine.
If they get compensated for not having a job by more than they would have earned at that recycling plant – fine.
But what “value” do we as a society attach to the time someone has that has no job and income from the same?
Or what value do we assign to those “jobs” that people take on in social projects / simply helping out in the neighborhood?
Will we value those spending the time they now have at hand with painting or reading or writing or just thinking and debating?
So far our society is based on people being an added value to society (and not a burden because they need public funding like welfare to buy food or pay rent) on them to “earn” their living….
Would love to hear your thoughts on this aspect
In California, many counties only allow triangle 1-4 to be recycled; so why not only sell triangle 1-4, instead of every fastfood container being triangle 5 which "has to go in the trash."
Also, the 'labor shortage' is garbage, more like a pay shortage with many companies trying to offer below minimum wage pay.
Near Sacramento; living wage needed is $24/hr, CA general min wage is $16/hr, many CA companies try to offer $14, some out of state companies try to offer fed min wage of $7.50 on CA job boards.
Though on the other side; for each and every job listing there are dozens of qualified people applying and none getting hired (even to the low wage jobs).
There seems to be many disconnects between plastics and recycling, and with people and hiring.
There is not a shortage of labor, the homeless and underpaid of many want work.
Also they're not discussing that normal recycle has a limited use till the particles are too broken down to be used again, they didn't discuss enzyme research, they didn't discuss plasma gasification, they didn't discuss different programs that use things like used tires & can make roads & tons of other small programs like that. This discussion was not very informed.
I don't know why they're not discussing that AI is just very VERY poorly paid & treated people using cameras to identify everything. AI is another greenwashing hoax. It has been exposed in robo cars identifying objects & even Amazon stores identifying items in your cart. There is NO AI it's all outsourced to wage slaves…..
How bad are landfills? I've heard of landfill islands & land reclamation, I've heard of methane capture which is turned into fuel…Recycling is very complicated, are landfills actually viable in some part as a reclamation tech.?
why was it failed to be mentioned that we need to produce fewer TYPES of container.
maintainer design is MOSTLY marketing.
we need a less consumerist paradigm
did i miss it… did they mention Wall-E?
In my city in the UK a human sorts out my recycling,.. Me, I sort it into the different colour boxes supplied by my local council it is then picked up by the collection people who dump the already sorted materials into their lorry(truck) which has separate hoppers for each material type, I always rinse out containers because it takes no time at all.This is all super easy & requires no robots. There are machines that sort steel from aluminium at the recycling centre that use the super high technology of a magnet to do this & there is a machine that uses a laser to sort the different types of plastic there too, I recycle the plastic film/bags at my local co-op (a supermarket) I compost most of my food waste & some of my plain brown cardboard in my garden although the local council does collect & compost this too. None of this is difficult or time consuming once you have done it a few times.
How do we get rich? Real estate. Site test cores and make a deal with the EPA about cleanup standards. Buy a landfill on potentially valuable land. Sort/recycle/gassify it at scale until the remainder can be economically shipped away. Then take your profit on the real estate sale.
And its going to be like eight bins, are you actually going to do that?….laughs in german
Quite a few years back I got in trouble and was given 180 hrs community service. The recycling center has double time so it was a no brainer. I found out from the guy running the place that 75% of what was recycled by civilians goes to the dump. In that town anyway. I watched 1000s of tons of recycling go to a landfill while I put 1000s of brand new recycling bins together. I never felt more useless while being so productive in my whole life.
You're wrong about one thing. Recycling is exactly what I thought it was. I guarantee there's no such thing as plastic recycling.
just remember that every recycling center is different. there is no standardization.
we DO have enough humans to sort it correctly… the humans that are THROWING THE GARBAGE AWAY TO BEGIN WITH.
i agree that the blame and burden ought not be placed on the consumer.. but also… the consumer is the one that has become do blasé about it all that they do not care. the paradigm shift HAS to come from the consumer at this point. apathy has ruined us.
of course we need to production to change. that is the bigger goal. but for the time being lets be conscious…
reduce reuse recycle
in other words…. consumer less.. waste less…. hold companies accountable more.
“The incredible drop in the price of GPU’s and that rise in efficiency…” Must be nice living on that timeline… GPU prices have tripled in the past decade as more and more gamers, crypto-miners, ai-developers, nation states, and scalpers fight over the supply.
The thing that would make the biggest difference: Separate compost / organic material from the rest of the trash. Wash any organics off the recyclables. This makes it a lot easier for robots to sort, but it also makes it so you can leave the house for a week, come back, and your bin isn't stinking.
A cat enclosed in a plastic bag in a recycling plant was noticed and saved by a human worker, could AI do that?
This "the robots get upset with doing our chores" thing is not a real issue. We would have to give the AI those emotions. Emotions don't emerge from consciousness or intelligence. They're a product of parts of animal brains designed to keep us alive. Fear, anger, sadness, happiness, arousal, hunger, etc — all of these things are primal and present in most animals regardless of intelligence because they direct the animal towards actions that promote survival.
AI won't have emotions unless we input those emotions ourselves, and there's no reason to train emotions into a clothes folding or a trash sorting machine.
You guys have managed to miss the point every single episode. 99 percent purity has nothing to do with the diverwion rate of the incoming stream. Every episode you make contains flaws of this basic sort.
I wanna live in Space gneugneugneu
Liberals such scared little racists.
Swedish recycling turns the trash into electricity, not the best strategy but better than landfill
The city i lived in literally thre the recycling in the landfill because there was nowhere to send it (this was when China stopped accepting recycling from other countries)