Recycling and Waste Management

Use of AI-Powered Robots for Recycling

Engineers are working on a novel strategy to enhance the recycling of soft plastics by building a smart robot that can recognise, classify, and segregate various recyclable waste streams. Despite recent advancements in plastic recycling, landfills continue to be a problem. With 94 percent of soft plastics like cling wrap and plastic bags ending up in landfills in 2016–17, they are a significant source of the issue. Soft plastics can't be recycled properly since they become tangled up in trash sorting equipment quickly, which causes mechanical problems and contaminates other recyclables like paper. Because of this issue, present recycling techniques rely on the tedious and risky physical sorting of soft plastics.