Ryan Dezember

We have bad recycling habits.

We usually don't really know what's desirable, what's recyclable.

And so it's a mess.

And a lot of the really valuable stuff

goes into the trash.

So these companies are starting to come back to the idea that maybe we just throw it all in one trash bag and then they sort it.

Let the computers do the work.

One big reason for not sorting through trash to get aluminum cans out, for example, is it's gross and unhealthy.

And you shouldn't expect people to have to do that.

If it's robots controlling machines, they don't care how disgusting it is.

Yeah, so the big sort of breakthrough in recent years has been combining the AI that can identify things instantly and tell machines what they should grab with basically little air jets.

And they will be at the end of a conveyor belt or in a big box and the material goes in.

And the computer will basically tell it, we want that.

That's a piece of newsprint.

Puff it.

And it'll send all the newsprint one way.

And everything else that's on the line goes the other way or drops down.

It kind of looks like chaos when you watch it.

But in the end, they're getting much more pure and clean bales of material.

And those have a better market price and are more useful to people to reuse.