Conversations about artificial intelligence took off in the media after the debut of ChatGPT this year, but AI had already been coiling its industry-changing hands around all sorts of applications for years, from conceptual art and design to these robot trash pickers, Sorty McSortface and Sir Sorts-a-Lot.

Working all day long at 80 recycling facilities across the US, Amp Robotics' smart sorting machines pluck contaminants from waste conveyor belts or sort various plastics into bins with the accuracy of a search engine and the mechanical speed of a chameleon's tongue catching flies on the wing.

Sorty McSortface and Sir Sorts-a-Lot ply their trade at the Boulder County Recycling Center in Colorado where they do a job that the USA has typically been bad at doing when averaged across states.

Very few recycling facilities can manage to produce sorted waste streams of the kind needed to provide companies with high-quality raw materials for reuse.

Along with that, perhaps only 9% of all plastic in America even makes its way into recycling facilities in the first place; rising as high as perhaps one-third of all glass waste.

Amp Robotics' Cortex sorting machine can pick out 80 separate items from waste streams per minute while recognizing billions of different shapes, sizes, granular specifics, colors, logos, and even SKU numbers among the garbage that would often remain hopelessly entangled.

It's already 99% accurate and becomes more accurate every year the waste is being sorted.

In a brilliant piece by Joe Fassler at The Atlantic, the CEO of Amp Robotics explained that robots like Sorty McSortface and Sir Sorts-a-Lot can read an SKU number of an item moving down the conveyor belt and recognize that as something manufactured by Unilever or SC Johnson for example, and know immediately what chemicals are used in the fabrication of the identified plastic.

Amp Robotics is just one of several companies pioneering various recycling sorting robots, and Fassler details that the industry is set for some incredible advancements including spectroscopy being brought into directly analyze chemical makeups of trash, as well as jets of air to push trash into various bins.

WATCH an explanation of the industry and these robots below… 

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