6 minute read
FACE BLUE AND BLACK BINS
Blue Bin or Black Bin, Does It Really Matter? Kind of
How tech-startup Orange Recycling aims to revolutionize the recycling industry
Advertisement
words & photography By THOMAS HUSEN
We are in way over our heads with plastics and the system we currently employ to recycle is broken. A startup company founded in March 2020 is trying to change the way we recycle. Orange Recycling, O.R., is made up of eight like-minded team members with one mission, modify the system by changing recycling mindset of consumers.
Some people couldn’t possibly care any less about the gross fact that micro-plastic particles have been found at the deepest explored places in the ocean and others genuinely want to make a difference.
Those in the latter group are under the impression that one of the best ways to make a practical difference – not using any plastics whatsoever aside – is to recycle.
The problem is, separating recyclable materials isn’t quite as simple as throwing the plastics and paper into the blue bin. Not all geographic locations are created equal with regard to what is accepted as a recyclable material. So, what happens to the glass bottles, plastic bags or the cheese-caked pizza box when the consumer tosses it into the recycling bin when it’s not actually accepted as a recyclable material?
In2018,theU.S.producedabout35.7milliontonsof plastics.
Just 8.7% of all that plastic was actually recycled, according to the research of the Environmental Protection Agency. So, if only a small percentage of plastics get recycled, where does the remaining 91.3% of plastic go? Some of it is burned to capture the gasses or melted into pellets for reuse, but most of it goes to a landfill where it is buried.
Glass bottles, certain plastic bags, that grease-soaked pizza box, where they are not accepted, are known as contamination and contamination is where the inefficiency in the system lives.
When the mound of garbage arrives at the materials recovery facility, MRF, it is sifted through and sorted by both hired human laborers and occasionally through machines with optical sensors. It is a process that takes a lot of time and a lot more money to produce a result that is not 100% effective.
“The problem that that’s caused is that there’s lots of contamination that’s introduced and into these systems that ends up being really expensive to remove, which makes the recycled materials that ultimately end up being used make new products, you know, new products from recycled material more expensive,” said David Gordon, co-founder and director of systems engineering.
O.R. diagnosed the inefficiency and has come up with a plan it believes will revolutionize how the system functions. It plans to install a camera powered with AI on every recycling truck. The device monitors and records all the materials entering the truck’s hopper and the AI determines whether or not the items entering the hopper belong.
By logging each pickup along the truck’s route, determinations about the consumer’s recycling practices are made. How many items were picked up from X home that were not acceptable and how does X’s recycling behavior compare to its neighbors, Y and Z?
“There’s sort of a lack of accountability in that system and let you know you can fill your recycling bin with trash and you kind of never hear about it whether you do it on purpose or not or if you just do it accidentally, it doesn’t really matter,” Gordon said.
For now, everyone pays a flat fee for their garbage to be picked up and forgotten about, with Orange, the consumer gets feedback. The feedback that is generated from the AI driven camera determines how much each consumer pays. A home that does not recycle at all pays more for diluting the contents of the hopper with contaminated materials than a home does that is diligent about sorting out unacceptable materials before they’re picked up and taken away.
“One of the things that’s kind of interesting about recycling is if you compare it to other utilities like electricity or water, recycling isn’t really measured,” Gordon said. “What we’re aiming to do is to start to measure this and give feedback to consumers about how they’re recycling, what they’re doing wrong and how they can be better to start to eliminate that contamination from entering the stream to begin with.”
O.R. is proposing a new order of operations for just about everyone involved. Consumers will be expected to create new recycling habits by being more diligent about what trash goes in certain containers. Either that or they’ll feel the consequences of their poor recycling practices in the decreased weight of their wallet.
This initiative may temporarily strain the
lives of those who are entirely unfamiliar with recycling currently, but O.R. believes the platform will benefit everyone involved, residents and city officials included.
“Cities will have more responsible residents and could ultimately leverage lower contamination numbers to have more lucrative contracts with MRFs,” said Miles Price, co-founder and business development and strategy team leader. “If we’re able to correct the mistakes that folks are making in their homes, we should have a cleaner recycling stream from the house to the truck, to the MRF hauler and collection companies will collect a cleaner product which will allow them to handoff a better, more valuable product to the MRF.”
If successful in its endeavor, O.R. expects to see two major changes, reduced contamination rates entering MRFs and an increased volume of recyclable material entering the MRF. Both of these changes being the outcome of incentivized education on how to recycle properly and taking action, trash going in the trash bin and recyclables going in the recycling bin. By educating communities, O.R.’s hope is that the community members will start to understand the importance of recycling well.
“It sounds like a good idea. I didn’t realize only certain types of plastic could be recycled, I thought plastic was plastic,” said public healthcare student, Sara Hardy-deBoisblanc. “The only problem I see that I can think of right now is apartments. How will they analyze the trash of the people who live in multi-family housing communities?”
How the company plans to enforce their new system in multi-family housing communities, like apartment complexes, Price inferred that was a little more of a complicated issue, but for now, Orange is focused on implementing the new system for single-family homes.
“Our platform will not only help people recycle properly, but also educate them on what products are sustainable,” said Co-Founder and CEO, Alex Woolf. “Most people don’t re-
alize that recycled glass has a negative market value, so recyclers lose money on each item they collect. Community members will also start to understand the environmental impact of single use plastic packaging and start to choose more sustainable packaging.”
O.R. does have a couple competitors in the market aiming to use advanced technologies to improve recycling. One of which, Amp Robotics, is focused on deploying robots within the MRF to reduce or eliminate human labor efforts as well as contamination.
“Amp’s technology should help improve the efficiency and profitability of MRFs. However, Orange’s offering will be more cost effective, as we’ll have many humans working together to solve a problem, compared to a few robots,” Woolf said.
According to a Waste Recycling Services report, the market size was valued at $53.71 billion in 2019 and the recycled plastics market is expected to increase dramatically over the next three years. Based on the latest market research report by Technavio, the recycled plastics market will grow by $14.74 billion by 2024.
