If consumers confused about recycling rules are instigating the contamination problem, Somervillie-based robotics startup rStream believes they can solve it by using artificial intelligence to sort trash and recycling instead. 鈥淥ur objective is to make equipment that can sort of waste and recyclables,鈥� said Ian Goodine, co-founder of rStream Ian Goodine. 鈥淭hat could be to service the function of separating single stream into various commodities that can ultimately be packaged and sold for remanufacturing. The other function which we鈥檙e doing here today is actually pre-sorting.鈥�
rStream has piloted its automated trash-sorting AI at the UMass dining commons and the UMass Waste Recovery and Transfer Facility, practicing its identification and separation of plastic, paper and cardboard. The more data to fine-tune its 聽algorithm, the better rStream鈥檚 robot technology can produce a cleaner recycled material for waste companies to sell, leading to a better recyclable product and lowering the amount of waste sent to landfills each year.
鈥淲e鈥檝e all experienced that feeling of staring at the waste bin, not knowing where to put the thing,鈥� Goodine said. 鈥淢ultiply that by 50,000 people every day, and there鈥檚 a lot of missed opportunities for the sustainable recovery of those materials.鈥� Using artificial intelligence鈥檚 ability to analyze photographs, rStream鈥檚 robot views each piece of trash inserted into the trailer through a camera, and attempts to match that image with other depictions of trash in its dataset. If the computer correlates an item with one of the recyclable materials in its database, it redirects it to be recycled.
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Author: Emilee Klein, Daily Hampshire Gazette