Urbaser has started using Artificial Intelligence at its Algimia de Alfara (Valencia) plant for waste sorting. The company has decided to invest in a waste sorting robot with Artificial Intelligence (AI), which has been installed on the existing reject belt.
The plant operations team had observed a significant amount of recyclable materials still present in the reject line, which justified the investment in technology to collect and separate these valuable materials. Thus, the main objective of this implementation is to increase the efficiency of the treatment process, reducing sorting costs and maximizing the value extracted, in addition to reducing the waste that ends up in landfills, generating fiscal savings.
The robot, called Recycleye QualiBot®, has been installed quickly and easily on the reject conveyor. The company in charge of its design and implementation has been the British company Recycleye, which has 45 similar systems operating in waste treatment centers throughout Europe.
This innovative system opens up new opportunities for the Urbaser team, improving consistency in triage tasks throughout the shift. The robot sorts and collects recyclable materials left in the reject, separating them into four categories: PET bottles, HDPE containers, aluminum cans, and paper and cardboard.
To do this, it uses an artificial vision system that scans each object on the belt and identifies it, based on a learning process that gathers a dataset of 1 billion images. When it identifies the material, it picks it up and deposits it in the corresponding container.
Among many applications, the robot detects PET bottles that are uncrushed or filled with liquid, which are difficult to detect using traditional optics. In addition, it has shown more efficiency in separating heavy pieces of paper and cardboard, such as magazines and books, increasing recovery for this category.
This technology differentiates waste not only by material, but also by object, allowing the Urbaser team to extract only aluminum beverage cans, leaving on the belt other aluminum objects of lesser value, such as trays or foil that often contain organic pollutant waste.
Thanks to the Recycleye QualiBot®, the plant has improved consistency in the recovery of recyclable materials, reducing landfill costs and increasing operational efficiency. It recovers, on average, 50 kg of materials per hour, with a collection rate of 1,500 items per hour.
