PORTSMOUTH, Va. — The city of Portsmouth will soon be home to a new, $200 million recycling facility powered by artificial intelligence, Mayor Shannon Glover announced during his annual State of the City address Friday.
The facility is a partnership between the Southeastern Public Service Authority of Virginia and AMP Sortation, which specializes in helping "waste companies and municipalities with AI-powered sortation services and automation at scale," according to its website.
"Now, since my fellow mayors are still here I want to take a minute to talk a little trash," Glover told the crowd at Rivers Casino. "Actually, not a little trash. A lotta’ trash."
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Glover said the facility will help extend the life of landfills in the region by using AI that sorts through trash and finds recyclables.
WTKR News 3 reported last September that Portsmouth's Recycling and Disposal Solutions transfer facility — which handles more than 100 tons every day — is already using this AI technology with AMP to sort through its garbage.
"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," AMP CEO & founder Matanya Horowitz told WTKR News 3's Erika Craven. "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."
Friday, Mayor Glover said the facility will "put Portsmouth at the forefront of smart, sustainable innovation in Hampton Roads."
