Humans have enlisted nearly 100 AI-powered robots in North American to come to the rescue for something humans are terrible at: recycling.
Even when we try to do it right, we're often making things worse; About one out of every four of the things people throw into the recycling bin aren't recyclable at all.
All those misplaced greasy pizza boxes (not recyclable) and clamshell containers tossed in with the plastics, have imperiled an industry that was never really that effective in the first place.
Only a small fraction of the over 2.1 billion tons of the garbage the world produces each year gets recycled — about 16%.
And even that small sliver has gotten smaller over the past year.
For decades, the US sold more than half of its recyclables to China — mostly plastics to be melted into pellets, the raw material for making more plastic.
But in March of 2018, China said, "No More."
"They started shipping more and more stuff to China, often contaminated dirty plastics or mixed too many mixed goods," said Kate O'Neill, a UC Berkeley professor and author of "Waste."
Around a quarter of the shipments China received had to be hand-processed, buried in landfills, or incinerated.
So the Chinese government declared that bales could contain only up to half a percent of things that contaminated them, like food wrappers or a dirty jar of peanut butter. US consumers and recycling centers couldn't keep up.
"I think people in the wealthy countries had gotten complacent, never bothering to build more recycling facilities domestically," O'Neill added.
Today, a handful of start-ups are testing out new technology to make recycling sustainable.
AMP Robotics is an artificial intelligence and Robotics company that aims to change the way we recycle.
Founder of AMP Robotics, Matanya Horowitz said "the situation with the Chinese export markets have actually been good for [the company]."
AMP Robotics is rolling out its latest model: a "Cortex Robot" that uses optical sensors to take in what rolls by, and a "brain" to figure out what his "hands" should do with something — even if it looks different to anything he's seen before.
"A lot of these recycling facilities are structured with the primary task of basically dealing with contamination that's not supposed to be there," said Horotwiz. ""What we see is a lot of recycling facilities are investing in automation to help improve their operations."
At least four companies are rolling out similar models, in the hopes of turning a profit from the US' growing piles of hard-to-sort recyclables.
And investors are taking notice.
