In September 2022, the Scottish waste management company acquired three AI robots from Recycleye which were retrofitted over a belt which handles reject material from the MRF, which was previously handled by three manual pickers.
Since then, the MRF, which handles 30,000 tonnes of recyclables from Fife council, has seen “improved recovery of recyclables and adapted to changing composition of the stream”.
Quality
David Goodenough, service manager at Cireco, said: “We have experienced a dual benefit: a reduction in the target materials lost to residue and an increase in the quality of material being outputted from other streams
“It’s enabled us to operate the plant on different settings, because the robots pick about 30,000 items per shift consistently, whereas with human operators, there are efficiency peaks and troughs throughout.”
In action
The systems extract PET bottles and aluminium that have been missed earlier in the plant before the residue from the line is sent to landfill. This method aims to “fortify Cireco’s profitability by increasing value extracted from the line, whilst decreasing sorting costs”.
When the robots were initially installed, aluminium cans were a small fraction of the residual line’s throughput, meaning only the last robot on the belt was directed to pick aluminium cans in addition to PET bottles, whilst the remaining two robots upstream picked exclusively rolling PET.
However, over the subsequent months, the proportion of aluminium in the stream is said to have increased significantly. In response to this change, the AI model directing the three robots was reprogrammed by Recycleye, so that all three robots began picking both target materials.
Cireco said this will help MRFs to prepare for upcoming regulation changes such as EPR and DRS.
System
The AI-powered robots are designed and manufactured by Recycleye and comprise a computer vision system which sits atop the residual belt, leveraging a camera and machine learning algorithms to detect each waste item by material and object.
This detection information, along with the coordinates of which chute the item should be sorted into, is sent to the corresponding robotic arm, which physically picks and shoots the material accordingly.
The robot has been installed over 30 times in MRFs across Europe.
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