Local startup designs AI-equipped trash-sorting robot
With high tech at its disposal, firm takes guesswork out of recycling
Humans, it seems, are not good at dealing with their trash.
We’re pretty good at making it, to be fair. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates every person generates 4.4 solid pounds of waste a day.
But when it comes to disposing of it and correctly sorting waste and recyclables? That’s not one of our strong suits. Soon, it may not even matter. Here to help is Point Breeze-based startup Clean Robotics, which expects its artificial intelligence-equipped trash-sorting machine — appropriately named the Trash Bot — will eventually be widely used.
When presented with two bins in which to place recycling, Clean Robotics found people choose correctly only30 percent of the time on average, according to Tanner Cook, the startup’s vice president of engineering. A lot of the items that are put into there cycling bin aren’t actually recyclable, thanks to food or liquid.
Clean Robotics, which started in 2015 in Alpha Lab Gear, a startup accelerator in East Liberty, has created an AI-equipped trash can that sorts items using cameras and sensors that track weight, condition and makeup, and then determines whether an item is trash or recyclable.
The company assembles the Trash Bots in its Point Breeze location, and has a probationary patent on the trash can.
Currently, most waste is sorted in recycling facilities — long after it gets tossed into trash cans and often too late to shield recyclables from any contamination. Trash Bot does the sorting at the beginning of the waste stream.
“This is the need of the hour,” said Aakash Pathak, Clean Robotic’s vice president of product
commercialization.
The idea came to the founders after they noticed that a grocery store trash can had about four different bins with symbols indicating which items should be thrown into which bin. More than one of the bins had a fork above it.
“I still get confused about Whole Foods bins,” said Charles Yhap, CEO of Clean Robotics.
Mr. Yhap said the team realized there was a problem it could solve, and the team members quickly began to design a prototype.
The first iteration was cardboard, he said, and the second one was wooden. Now the TrashBot, which is still in small batch production, is stainless steel. Since the development of the AI technology began in 2016, it has gotten to 90 percent accuracy in sorting the trash.
Clean Robotics declined to say how much in investments it has received, but in May, New Jersey-based waste management company RiverRoad Waste Solutions invested $150,000, Mr. Pathak said.
Although Mr. Pathak and Mr. Cook declined to put an exact price on a TrashBot, they said it is comparable to a normal set of commercial trash bins you’d see in an airport or stadium, which can cost between $1,200 and $3,000.
Despite its Transformersesque name, the TrashBot looks just like a large trash bin.
Its metal outer shell has two receptacles, with a message warning “ONE ITEM ATA TIME.”
Although the TrashBot is pretty good at sorting the items into separate landfill and recyclable containers, having to handle two things at once can trip it up, Mr. Cook said.
Hockey fans at PPG Arena — where Clean Robotics recently installed a TrashBot — shoppers at a mall in Australia and travelers at the Pittsburgh International Airport don’t really have to do anything special. They just throw in their trash, and the robot takes care of the rest.
Above the high-tech trash can, a screen shows the inner workings of the TrashBot as well as educational videos about what items are recyclable.
Mr. Cook said while people won’t need to have that knowledge when throwing material away in the TrashBot, the company is hoping to correct some of the incorrectly held views of what is and isn’t recyclable.
One of the most vexing things for Mr. Cook and Mr. Pathak is the coffee cup. Those billions of sturdy paper cups that hold your piping hot coffee or tea? They’re not recyclable.
Plastic bags? They often aren’t able to be recycled, as they can easily get stuck in machines at recycling facilities, according to Mr. Cook.
“What it comes down to is wishful and hopeful recycling. People will recycle objects that aren’t recyclable because they want them to be recyclable,” Mr. Cook said. “Separating those recyclables properly at the front end prevents so many issues at the back end that a lot of people generally don’t see.”
Thereare about eight TrashBotsin use today, and severalmore are scheduled tobe deployed in the coming months.
While they are still in small batch production, Mr. Cook said they expect to expand their reach rapidly in the next couple of months. Building operators have reached out to Clean Robotics because they have hit a ceiling in their sustainability goals, with trash often being the last, gross and untouched frontier.
Custodians at the facilities are fans of the TrashBots, Mr. Cook said. The machines have software that can send alerts when the bins, which have slightly smaller capacities than normal trash cans, are full.
TheTrashBot also collects dataon how much landfill trashand recyclables are beingthrown away and what kindof items are being thrownout more often than others.
This allows facility managers to estimate how much they will be spending in waste pickup, and will also help them to make small changes to become more sustainable, Mr. Pathak said.
“If you know that 90 percent of the waste that’s going in the landfill in your building comprises of coffee cups? Well, maybe it’s time to give your employees reusable coffee cups,” he said. “That can significantly reduce the amount of waste that is produced that ends up in landfill.”