Recyclers are having significant challenges sourcing and verifying high-quality bales of recycled material. Due to a lack of efficiency in MRFs, there is a limited supply of high-quality, clean bales of materials, and the available ones come at a steep cost. As a result, recyclers must buy low-quality bales from multiple suppliers that are filled with contamination. This contamination can increase recyclers' processing costs, lead to plant downtime, and result in increased operational expenses, ultimately making the outgoing materials more expensive.
With unreliable feedstock from multiple suppliers causing increased processing costs and plant downtime, the question arises: how can you effectively manage and process these low-quality bales of material coming into your facility? AI and robotics are here to help.
EverestLabs' AI and robotics platform, RecycleOS, can be strategically deployed across your facility to address your feedstock challenges. Here's how:
When placing RecycleOS AI throughout your facility, we can provide visibility and insight into your plant operations like never before. Our material characterization data can identify every object going in and out of your plant. We can identify contaminants, break down materials by color distribution, and even identify FDA vs. non-FDA-grade material for polypropylene. What’s more, our material characterization data can perform bale audits.
RecycleOS AI bale audits analyze bales coming into your plant with industry-leading accuracy, tracing and verifying your supply of recycled feedstock to help you understand contamination rates. This data helps your facility in two specific ways:
You can’t rely on just one supplier for your materials, so how do you manage the variability? Each supplier has different contaminants that must be identified and sorted. Robotics can help.
RecycleOS robotics ensure your facility can process materials more efficiently and produce a higher yield of clean materials. In addition, robotics can remove contaminants that would cause machines to shut down and delay the processing of your material.
How can we do this? Our robotics have a 95% uptime and can be placed throughout your facility to increase material recovery by 2-3 times over traditional sorting methods. In addition, RecycleOS is the only system that can be installed in any existing recycling lines, where other robots and humans cannot go. It doesn’t require expensive retrofits and installs within a few hours, avoiding plant downtime.
Since purchasing high-quality bales of material is costly and may still include contaminants. A more cost-effective approach is to automate the cleaning and sorting of low-quality or mixed bales of material with robotics. This cost-effective alternative to buying clean bales yields the same results.
Using AI and robotics, we can help your facility produce cleaner bales of materials and reduce downtime, lowering your processing costs while increasing your output of high-quality recyclables.
The best part? Most multi-shift recycling plants see a payback on their robotic systems in less than six months, with some seeing a payback in as little as three months. This payback is against hard labor costs alone and doesn’t include savings facilities see from increased material recovery, decreased landfill fees, turnover rates, lower training costs, and reduced injuries.
Watch our video to learn how EverestLabs can effectively help your facility manage feedstock variability.
Get in touch with an expert to learn how RecycleOS can help your facility.