How Are Robots Helping Us to Recycle Better - ASME

The front end of recycling is familiar to the point of invisibility: Blue bins, clear bags, and barely comprehensible signs designating which material goes where. Once the right plastic or paper is put in the right place, most people forget all about it. For the actual recycled material, though, that's not the end of the journey but rather the beginning. Most of it gets trucked to a special recycling facility, where it is unceremoniously dumped on a concrete floor. Front-end loaders scoop bottles, papers, and myriad other materials onto conveyors, which zoom off in various directions, often climbing to different levels like staircases.