Automated, Digitised and Decentralised Circular Waste Sorting

Given all material has value, waste should not exist -- simply materials in the wrong place. Yet, 485m tonnes of material p/a is still not recycled in the UK but sent to landfill, exported abroad, or even worse ends up in the ocean. Currently, the recycling industry relies on large-scale material recovery facilities (MRF) which sort recyclables into usable material (purity = value). However, these require years of planning, large capital investment, numerous expensive machines and still use an agency workforce to manually sort materials. Smaller-scale facilities use manual labour entirely to sort waste as the capital cost for a minimal working MRF is too high.

With this project, Recycleye will disrupt the waste management industry by creating a rapidly deployable, decentralized, scalable, digital & fully-automated sorting solution - mini material recovery facilities (mini-MRF). Recycleye has already developed a state-of-the-art computer vision system using recent advances in deep learning and AI capable of classifying items by material type and brand. The project's key objectives are to augment this vision-system with a robotic arm. A conveyor will carry waste towards the system where the vision unit will detect the different types of recyclables. Then, using a robotic arm the waste types will be sorted into respective piles providing a sorted/pure stream of recyclables that can then be re-injected into the UK economy/ sold to reprocessors.

The project will focus on replicating uniquely human abilities - which machines have up until now not been able to match. The eye: The Recycleye vision system is able to, for example, understand that a piece of cardboard is pizza box (and hence likely food contaminated) even if it is torn, half-hidden by another item and covered in dirt. The arm: A mechanical arm is the most efficient way of removing target materials without having to rely on a material's physical characteristics (densities, ferrousity, form factor, etc). The project will build and test a fully operational mini-MRF ready for mass production.

By developing the low-cost and data-driven sorting solution the recycling industry desperately needs, Recycleye is building the UK's future waste management infrastructure and accelerating the country's transition towards a circular economy.