Name: A global recycling crisis is fueling innovation
Uploaded: 2021-09-27
Duration: 7 min 5 s
Description: Stricter policies on recycling have accelerated a growth in recycling tech startups.

Stricter policies on recycling have accelerated a growth in recycling tech startups.

A global recycling crisis is fueling innovation

Environment

it is a major global pollution crisis of an enormous scale and the underlying issue here is our broader economic system, which is a take make and waste system. If we continue on this trajectory with the exponential growth of plastic that we're seeing now, there will be more plastics in our oceans than fish. By 2050. Wasteful system is harming biodiversity is contributing to the climate crisis is wasting a lot of finite resources, but also on a, on the economic point of view, the plastics that we're wasting is $100 billion worth of materials that is lost to our global economy every single year. There really is value in this plastic, there's value in this metal, there's value in the paper. The challenge has been the cost of separating it out. Getting the plastics by themselves. Getting the paper by themselves is quite costly. So as you bring that cost of sorting down, you'll find more and more materials start to become profitable to recycle. And so what we get excited about is the idea that technology like ours can significantly reduce the cost of sorting. That now allows you to realize that value. The core piece of our technology is really this artificial intelligence that allows us to identify material, we have a camera that sits over a conveyor belt, identifying bottles, cans, paper, you name it when it sees a piece of material that our system. Once it'll send a signal to a robot that's just a couple of feet down the conveyor belt. The robot says, okay, there's the bottle I want. It then reaches out, uses a suction based gripper to grab the item and then throws it into a receptacle where that material is being collected. We can provide all sorts of information to the recycling facilities about how efficient their operations are, where the material is going. But just as important as we can identify the material at the brand level and even at the school level and once we know that we know a lot about that object that lets us do is when we separated out, we can say, we know for this whole ton of plastic you may be selling it is you know, 98% number one plastic, it is 2% number five plastic. And by the way, all of the contaminants that are in there here is what they are now as a buyer of that material, I can be sure about the quality and I can be sure that it's going to meet the chemical requirements uh for whatever and good I want to make, we're really at the front end of this process and facilities are just beginning to understand the implications of robotics for their business. We buy now all know that recycling is one part of the solution, but we won't recycle way out of that and we also need to really look upstream and think about how to deliver products to consumers without generating packaging waste and and one of the options to do that is reused models and reusable packaging and the loop platform, for example, is one of these models, which we would call kind of return models where products are delivered to consumers, they consume the actual product that is in the packaging and the reusable packaging is taken back, is cleaned, is refilled and can be used over and over again. You know, we vilify plastic today, but don't think plastic is necessarily evil. I don't think metal is evil. I think using them once is the wrong in loop. Instead of the consumer owning the package, the consumer borrows the package and the package is always property of the manufacturer. And then they're financially motivated, forget sustainability, financially motivated to make them long lasting and durable and even potentially brings new features to the package, like keeping things fresh longer. Cools longer, warm longer. All these things you couldn't do in disposable. We do see large businesses also play an important role here because in the end, they are still the ones defining how the vast majority of packaging and plastic products put on the market are designed and in particular the brands and the retailers here are crucial because they are the ones who decide what materials they use, how their products and packaging is designed, how their business model is set up. Is it a single user reused model? We vote for the future we want with money multiple times a day with what we buy because what manufacturers and retailers are looking at is not to sell us what we don't want that to figure out what we want to give it to us. So if we change our desires, things on the shelf will change full stop. It's not about simply trying to eliminate all packaging or recycled packaging at the expense of creating much more food waste. We need to think about how can we deliver food to consumers in a way that does not generate packaging waste appeal is an edible plant derived coding that extends the shelf life of fresh fruits and vegetables. The product is manufactured as a powder and then mixed in solution with water and spray, then lightly dried onto the produce upstream. So we partner with produce suppliers. Packers, growers, distributors, importers in some instances to integrate our application systems into their packing lines. By applying the product, we're able to extend the shelf life, such that produce last up to 2 to 3 times longer and it can reduce waste can create other sustainable outcomes. Plastic packaging has sometimes been seen as sustainable alternatives to food waste and that's not necessarily greenwashing. There's this tension between the environmental impacts of food waste and then environmental impacts of plastic packaging. Food waste contributes 8% of all global greenhouse gas emissions and really the best way to reduce those emissions is to prevent food waste from happening in the first place. If we're eliminating food ways for eliminating all of the upstream resources, use transportation emissions, everything that goes into the one third of food that grown for consumption that goes to waste. The issue we're facing is of an enormous scale. And the journey towards creating a fully circular economy for plastics is is a multi decade journey that we're in a lot still needs to be done. But there's also encouraging signals of a lot of these discussions happening, businesses raising their ambition level, so there's definitely still a lot to be done too early to celebrate victory here, but really encouraging signs that it's accelerating. Yes.