Trash is a messy problem. The seven billion humans on earth generate 1.3 billion tons of waste each year, a number that will increase to 2.2 billion by 2025. 70% of that waste currently ends up in landfills or the environment, and it costs hundreds of billions of dollars just to throw it all away. Trash is also a valuable resource. It is a collection of commodities that, if separated and clean, can be reused and recycled in perpetuity. If conditions are favorable, recycling is usually cheaper and more efficient for consumers, manufacturers, government and the environment. But keeping trash clean and sorted enough to recycle is a really difficult problem. For recycling to work, every person in the community has to know what can or can't be recycled, how to recycle it, and what bins to put it in. Intelligent recycling bins have the potential to solve this problem and create an economy that uses and reuses raw materials as efficiently as possible, eradicating waste altogether. 

Looking to the future, global waste will grow in size and complexity with continuing economic prosperity. By 2060, the median income for the world will equal that of the current median income here in the US. The 10 billion people of the world will be consuming and creating waste the same way the 350 million people of the US do today. To match that increase, the OECD suggests our raw material consumption will go from 90 billion tons today to 167 billion tons in 2060. To support that growth, we’d either have to double the resources we use today and risk destroying our environment, or get better at using what we already have.

But waste is a construct. It’s what a product becomes after we’re done consuming it or we’ve replaced it. Chemically speaking, there’s not much difference between the plastic takeout containers in your recycling bin and the new takeout containers in restaurants you order from. The newspaper you’re reading today is the same material as the newspaper you read yesterday. For much of what we create, the materials can be reused and recycled in perpetuity so long as they are kept pure. They are molecules like anything else, and they can be turned into other useful things when you’re done with them.

Reuse and recycling are like production multipliers on the material we’ve extracted from the earth. Take aluminum for example, 75% of the aluminum we use is kept in circulation through recycling. If we didn’t recycle, we’d need four times as much aluminum to produce what we currently do today. Aluminum is a great example because it can be recycled in perpetuity and does not downgrade with each cycle. Using recycled aluminum also costs about 5% of what new aluminum costs, economically and in terms of energy as well. That figure doesn’t even account for the reductions in sulfur oxide and nitrogen oxide, two harmful gases produced by the aluminum smelting process, that gets released into the atmosphere. Even here in the US, where all recycling is mixed and collected in a single bin, aluminum is easy to recycle because it can be separated from the rest of recycling using an eddy current. 

But not all material is like aluminum: other materials are more difficult to recycle because they are much easier to contaminate. Contamination is essentially any material foreign to the type of material being recycled, so if you have plastics in your organics or organics in your plastics the material could be considered contaminated. If a material has low enough contamination, like recycled office paper or industrial scrap metal, it is considered a commodity and is easy to find a market for. But the reverse is also true, and if the material is too contaminated then it usually goes straight to the landfill.

Unfortunately, the effort it takes to keep recycling well sorted and free (enough) of contamination often makes buying virgin materials much cheaper for manufacturers. Even though the raw materials in recycling are free, producing quality post-consumer paper, plastic, or glass requires extensive manual labor. Countries like Germany and Japan give this responsibility to their citizens, requiring source separation (in home and office sorting), educational and outreach programs, and hefty government fines for improper recycling. Source separation is the best existing option for recycling, but the system is fragile to human error. Source separation requires every individual to have an understanding of how and what to separate, and one poor recycler in a neighborhood can contaminate everyone’s recycling. In British Columbia, a province that requires source separation, the contamination rates are upwards of 5%. That may not sound like a lot, but most manufacturers look for material that has far lower contamination.

Here in the United States, we sidestep the issues of source separation with single stream recycling. Single stream recycling systems shift more of the responsibility of recycling towards waste management companies. Most recycling programs in the US process recyclables in material recovery facilities (MRF), which use a combination of mechanisms and manual labor to sort through waste. Contamination rates are much higher in single stream systems, ranging between 5% and 25% depending on the material. The US once required more categories of source separation; however, our recycling rates were abysmal during this period because American municipalities did not invest significant resources in community education the same way countries like Germany and Japan did. Consequently, in most municipalities switching to single stream recycling in the 1990s and 2000s actually lifted recycling rates.

A decentralized recycling solution using intelligent recycling bins enables production of higher quality post-consumer material. This system combines the advantages of source separation with the precision and reliability of software and the ease of single stream disposal systems, enabling a significant reduction in processing costs and contaminants. The advantages over single stream are clear, reliable source separation is cheaper and more effective than any offsite solution, but using AI has advantages over traditional source separation as well. By detecting item specific contamination levels, intelligent recycling bins can prevent objects over a certain level of contamination from entering the recycling stream. The network of bins also enables household level targeting for education and redirection of specific bins to landfills (if necessary). Due to these advantages, a technology enabled solution may outperform even the most disciplined human source separation. These levers over contamination ensure the production of high quality recycling from municipal waste.

Producing higher quality post-consumer material will recover more value from waste streams, lowering waste management fees or potentially eradicating them altogether. If we can reliably produce high quality material at a low cost using smart recycling bins, then more and more of these materials will start to look like aluminum. Recycled glass with 99% purity for example sells at $70 - $100 dollars per metric ton, degrade that purity to 95% and it sells for just $0 to $10 per metric ton. Most single stream recycling facilities can only produce recycled glass with 80% purity at best, and have to pay $10 to $35 dollars to get rid of it. There’s a similar story for plastic, with sorted PET, HDPE, and PP selling between $200 to $300 per metric ton, but mixed plastics (the kind produced by most single stream facilities) has a negative valuation. Recycled aluminum can be sold for $1,000 per ton. In most waste management contracts in the US, municipal government pays around $90 per ton of recyclables, and then recovers around 80% of the revenue from resale. At these rates, it may be more economical to spend more and increase the quality of the sort rather than save money through single stream. 

Using AI to sort waste also provides government and end users access to data and strategies to reduce environmental and monetary costs from waste. A municipality could have a real time understanding of the composition of its waste stream, and understand what type of outreach can produce the best return on investment. Over time, these strategies could divert more material from landfills (and tipping fees) and into the recycling and composting streams. Households and businesses could also have visibility into how well they are recycling, where their waste is going, and how much of it is ultimately recovered and reused. These insights enable consumers to take more ownership over their waste, and make more informed decisions about the kinds of products they utilize. The same data could help inform the kinds of packaging manufacturers produce, and the materials they use to do it. Ultimately the problem of waste cannot be solved without organized and accessible data to coordinate the actions of consumers, government, and business.

Intelligent recycling bins have the potential to improve our economic and ecological standard of living using fewer raw materials. Imagine the forests we would save, the wildlife we could preserve, the earth our children could inherit if we could keep what we extract from the earth in circulation as long as possible, rather than paying to have it landfilled. According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 45% of global emissions currently come from production, and using recycled materials can reduce these emissions by 40%. In a sense, the potential for emissions reduction makes reinventing the way we manage waste an existential necessity. Here at Enso, we want to organize the world’s trash and make it continuously reusable.