21
2022
Innovation
manual waste pickers to identify and extract
high-value materials,’ he argues.
‘In recent years, however, the economic
efficiency of manual sorting has been chal-
lenged for a number of reasons,’ he continues.
‘Firstly, the average manual rate is 40-45 picks
per minute. Although this may seem high,
picks vary significantly depending on the
length of shifts and operations such as shift
changes and toilet breaks.’
In comparison, Recycleye’s robotic picker
does not require breaks or shift changes and
works at a high speed with a consistent out-
put. ‘Indeed, our robotic pickers exceed hu-
man performance with 55 successful picks
per minute, enabling facilities to double their
current throughput,’ he declares. ‘With the
UK having failed to hit its recycling target for
2020, automating the sorting process is the
only way forward. By embedding computer
vision, recycling facilities are provided with
24/7 compositional waste item analysis on
metrics such as item count, plant downtime
and weight, which give the traceability and
accountability needed to accommodate ex-
tended producer responsibility policies.’
A kind of magic
Talking about what tomorrow holds in
terms of robotic sorting, Dewulf simply says:
‘There is so much more to come…’ Recycleye’s
technology currently works in conjunction
with optical sorters within the waste sorting
infrastructure. ‘This could be brought to the
next level, though, by integrating it into other
existing machinery such as air-jet shooters
and eddy currents. In turn, this would further
maximise the waste sorting yield.’
He also suggests using computer vision
at different stages of the recycling process,
such as intelligent bins or collection services.
Doing so will not only increase recycling ef-
ficiency but also reduce costs.
AMP’s Matanya Horowitz points out that
recyclers seem ready to welcome robotic sort-
ing solutions as they are ‘aggressively’ pur-
chasing multiple systems at the same time
instead of testing the waters with just one.
Looking ahead, he says: ‘A quote that comes to
mind is: “Any sufficiently advanced technol-
ogy is indistinguishable from magic.” It’s fair
to say that we live in a time when the benefits
of technology are vast and are only accelerat-
ing. This creates a number of opportunities;
I’ve continually tried to learn and master
technological tools to accrue opportunities
to hasten this trajectory. I’m thrilled to have
even a small hand in that.’
Victor Dewulf: ‘Our system currently holds 270 million images – the world’s largest dataset of scanned waste.’
Matanya Horowitz: Recyclers are ‘aggressively’
purchasing multiple systems at the same time.
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