Robotics in recycling? Using artificial intelligence-enabled bottle sorting robotics has enabled Evergreen, one of North America’s three largest producers of food-grade recycled polyethylene terephthalate (rPET), to significantly increase its plants’ recycling performance, the company said.
Working with AMP Robotics Corp., an AI company with a focus on the wast industry, the recycler installed AI-enabled robotic sorting lines at its site in Clyde, Ohio in April 2021 and at its Riverside site in California in August 2021.
Evergreen has now announced that AMP will also be installing a number of robotic sorting lines at its Albany, New York plastics recycling and rPET manufacturing facility. Once the project is completed, 15 high-speed, highly accurate robotic lines will be operating at three of Evergreen’s United States locations. The installation is targeted to be completed by mid-2022.
Replacing previously manual sorting processes with high-tech robotics is part of a strategic vision to transform not just the company, but the overall plastics recycling industry, explained Evergreen president and CEO, Omar Abuaita.
“With demand for recycled PET (rPET) at the highest levels in history, we simply can’t rely on outdated ways of doing business,” he said. “Automating our sorting lines allows us to support ever-larger PET recycling streams, provide the millions of pounds of food-grade rPET our customers have committed to purchasing, and achieve a safer, more efficient work environments for our team.”.
Evergreen is a portfolio company of private equity firm the Sterling Group. The company has invested more than $200 million in modernisation, capacity expansion, and acquisitions over the last 12 months. In addition to the new robotic lines, the company is currently expanding the rPET capacity at the Evergreen Clyde site.
Evergreen currently recycles more than 11.6 billion post-consumer PET bottles a year, up from 2 billion in 2021. The AI-enabled sorting lines have increased both the speed and accuracy of sorting, enabling more contaminants to be picked from the stream and leaving high quality clear and green PET bottles to be recycled.
Evergreen’s annual capacity of food-grade rPET is around 67 thousand tonnes (147 million pounds), up from just 18 thousand tonnes (40 million pounds) only one year ago.
When the company’s expansion at Evergreen Clyde is completed in mid-2022, its annual rPET capacity will rise to some 99 thousand tonnes (217 million pounds).