fastcompany.com

Finally some good news on the recycling front.
Inside sprawling warehouses that the industry calls “MRFs” or materials recovery facilities, machines and workers often sort through hundreds of tons of waste a day. The process is imperfect, and valuable recyclables can often get missed and accidentally sent to the landfill. A bale of one type of plastic might also be mixed with other materials, making it less valuable when it’s sold to another company to be shredded, melted, and ultimately recycled. In some cases, a bale of materials might be so “contaminated” that a recycler rejects it completely, and it also ends up in the trash.
But a growing number of sorting centers are turning to AI-powered recycling robots to help. One startup in the space, called Glacier, is now working with dozens of customers across the country to capture recyclables that otherwise would have been lost or undervalued. Today, the company announced that it raised $7.7 million in seed funding from New Enterprise Associates and Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, with additional participation from other investors.