Recycling costs more or benefits more?
Newly invented AI-trash sorting machine help deducting recycling cost
Take-outs, plastic bags, used lunchboxes, junk mail, and cards, numerous trash is created by our human being in 2019. The increasing awareness of developing a sustainable city is being discussed for a long while. Beginning in 2016, New York City initiated its Zero Waste project, aiming to stop recyclable and reusable materials from ending up in landfills. Zero Waste is always about reducing trash landfill, increasing the recycling rate, trash reuse rate. Nevertheless, after 3 years of operation, problems have raised. Lacking participating rate, few curbside collection points, along with increasing cost of recycling. This waste collection project seems to confront their bottleneck.
Although sustainability is trending today, there are still people who either don’t know the benefit of recycling or how to recycle. Thus, in the Zero Waste Project, they assess residences’ behavior. However, they still have to hire a numerous street-level worker to sort trash, teach residents how to recycle. The increasing cost is overweighting the benefit of Zero Waste Project.
To reducing the high labor cost and boost the efficiency of trash sorting, MIT and Yale University have invented an AI-trash-sorting robot. The trash-sorting robot relies on machines learning and computer vision to recognize the trash differences. Compared with the previous sensor-driven robot, this AI-trash-sorting robot could provide a reliable trash-sorting result, aiming to increase the accuracy and efficiency of the trash sorting center. This can also be implemented in-home or commercial office to reduce labor cost.
In my perspective, an AI-driven trash-sorting robot would help the city to lower cost, boost efficiency. Talking about family use, Ai-sorting can be the best resolution to prevent manually sorting and to increase accuracy. Overall, AI-trash-sorting can efficiently increase the percentage of people who recycled and decreases the cost of running a city-scale waste recycling program. Moreover, make benefit of recycling overweight the cost of recycling.
