PORTSMOUTH, Va. — In most areas of the country more than half of recyclables don't enter the recycling system because those items are thrown in the trash. But some in Portsmouth are taking that trash and making sure certain materials are recovered.
More than 100 tons of garbage move through Portsmouth RDS's MSW transfer facility daily. Roughly a quarter of that waste is made of recyclable items that were thrown away.
"We'd like to go where the garbage is, where the goods are," explained AMP Robotics Corp. director and head of product Carson Potter as he walked News 3 through the facility.
Watch: Virginia Beach Waste Management clarifies when to recycle, when to throw out
The piles of garbage are fed into machines and onto a conveyor belt. There's one stop where human hands help to sort material. Down the line an AI algorithm, helped by robotic sorters and jets of air, sorts the rest.
"It pulls out all these correlations and it figures out, okay what are the logos, shapes, textures that's correlated with this can or whatever it is. At this point it's kind of superhuman in terms of what [the AI algorithm] can identify. So most of the effort goes towards teaching it new things; kind of brand-level identification, or specific plastic resins," explained Matanya Horowitz, founder and CEO of AMP.
Horowitz said as the AI gets more precise — learning to identify the makeup of each item — the value of what can be sorted out and sold increases. He calls the system "next generation recycling" and said it has some big pros, like extending the life of landfills and reducing disposal costs for municipalities.
Watch: Virginia Beach curbside recycling voted to continue
"You're pulling out material really close to where it's generated, you end up having really significant transportation savings. This also means you're able to have a very high rate of diversion because you're accessing all of the material stream, not just what people are putting in the recycling bin," said Horowitz.
"Driving more circularity, reducing the need for virgin materials to be put into your plastic and paper products. Another major impact is this type of model is an opportunity to take the organic material that would be going into landfills otherwise and condition it into a place it can be used for bio-fuels or low carbon products," added Potter.
The facility is run as a pilot program, started earlier this year. The company says since roll out, the AI technology has proven efficient and exceeded reliability and volume expectations.
Watch: Drop-off recycling locations have saved Chesapeake $2 million
They hope to bring the tech to other areas of Hampton Roads.
