Ryan Dezember

They're trying to see if they can take this cocktail of bacteria they've developed and make copper out of stuff that was essentially waste.

This could potentially open up a lot of that material to become useful stuff for us.

Thank you.

America's recycling sorting facilities are undergoing a pretty significant technological revolution thanks to AI.

And what is happening with AI is it's sort of replacing a lot of the humans that would stand over these conveyor belts and have to like grab all the beer cans or the

cardboard boxes or whatever they're trying to sort.

The AI is taking over as sort of a brain.

It watches everything.

They put these boxes over the conveyor belts that watch every item and they instantly recognize what it is, if it's food grade material, how much the market price of it might be in the commodities markets to resell this stuff.

Some of these even calculate like the center of gravity for each piece of

recycling that you throw away so that a robotic claw or something could grab it down the line.

It's like a really remarkable thing, and it's taking one of probably the least desirable jobs in the country away.

Well, it's sort of being applied to all the trash.

And the reason, you know, a lot of these facilities just take the recycling, right?

Single stream recycling where you don't really separate your cans from your plastic bottles, from your cardboard boxes, but all goes into like one bag or two bags.

That all gets taken to something called a material recovery facility or a MRF.

And those are all over the country.

And that's sort of the standard way to do it is sort through once humans have at home separated what they think is recyclable and what's not.

Now, basically, humans are really bad.

Americans in particular are really bad at recycling.