During the 2017 project pilot phase, the Carton Council provided MRFs with grants to purchase and work with AMP to install carton-sorting robots. The first was at Alpine Waste & Recycling in Colorado, followed soon after by one at Dem-Con Companies in Minnesota. Past the pilot phase, the robots are now ready for prime time and there have been growing numbers of installations in the U.S. and Canada. This summer, another carton-sorting robot was installed at Single Stream Recyclers in Sarasota, Florida, along with several robots to sort other valuable materials and help to reduce contamination. With arms and grippers that can pick materials out of the recycling stream faster and with a higher rate of accuracy than their human counterparts, these robots utilize a vision centre with a camera that allows for monitoring materials as they pass through on a conveyer belt.

In 2011, the Finnish company ZenRobotics was first on the waste management scene with their robotic waste sorter. Their system used a combination of computer vision, machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI) to run synchronized robotic arms to sort and pick recycled materials from moving conveyor belts. The company broke ground with recycling stations that were tied together in a neural network and the AI learned, from real-time feeds providing data from metal sensors, 3D laser cameras and spectroscopic cameras, to select and sort the right items from the belt. Sadako Technologies has been working on an AI-infused garbage sorting systems on a smaller scale than Zen Robotics. The company also uses proprietary algorithms that connect to a multi-layer neural network system which lives in the cloud.