This works at scale. Here's a 90 ton per hour recycling facility.[3]
This is the difference between feel-good recycling and industrial scale recycling.
Those industrial robots don't drive around an office building with people around. They can't be repurposed to solve other problems. These Google robots have already been doing other tasks around the MTV campus (for demonstration and research purposes, not yet practically useful).
And no, little robots driving around google's campus is not going to change the world - it's a fun novelty.
We need more of the sorting machines linked above. Everything into a single bin, and let the processing plant determine what best to do with it. Not everything that goes into a recycle bin actually gets recycled, etc. Let the pros handle it.
Recycling/Composting needs to be 100% transparent to your average person for it to actually work.
A system where humans split garbage from recycling, and then potential split recycling into e.g. corrugated cardboard, glass and everything else can work just fine.
How do I know this? It's the system we have where I live, and as far as I can tell, it works better than most others.
Contamination remains an issue, but that's likely to be even more true if humans do no separation at all.
If it's done perfectly every single time - sure. But these are humans we're discussing...
It's silly to even have to think about if something can be recycled or not. Gotta look for that recycle number on the package first - ah, this seemingly regular plastic bottle cannot be recycled after all! Pizza box with a small amount of oil stain? Nope, can't recycle that either.
Sorting machines are clearly the only reliable way to manage waste. Everything else is a distraction meant to make you feel good about doing your part, even though the reality is you probably did some of it wrong and half of the stuff won't be recycled anyway.
Fine, throw anything remotely potentially recyclable together (and have it post-sorted), but not cooking fat, diapers, dog shit, and more.
Look at how every country's COVID strategy depended on cooperative, altruistic, collective action from ordinary people. This strategy failed everywhere it was tried.
Humans are fallible, and make mistakes. Humans also have more important things to worry about than what can or cannot be recycled (the reality shocks most people).
It must be automated if it is important enough to do at all. It has nothing to do with cooperation, altruism, collective action or whatever.
And also like you said, most things are not commercially viable to recycle, so a lot of things people put in blue bins ends up in landfills anyway.
Humans should only be used for a very rough split of garbage - e.g. separate yard waste from other trash, and that's it.
I wonder if if would be more economical to have robots to pre-sort locally, before it enters the stream? Because if I had a big bucket o' refuse that a local robot would then check the /5\ codes or whatever and sort locally, it would have up to 6 days to do that and thus wouldn't have any hard realtime requirements
Failure scenarios are always present, as is keeping the poor thing clean, but it could still end up being more economical IF the streams really are a source of value, and not -- as I am increasingly starting to believe -- just a sham by the plastics industry to make one think recycling exists
I think this is like you read some university press release about some research into a weird graph theory algorithm and explained that social networks have been available for decades and their approach isn’t relevant there.
The waste sorting systems are interesting.
The big insight seems to be that you need some robots, but most of the job can be done by simple machines that use gravity, air jets, screens, and magnets. The robots just pull out stuff that wasn't properly sorted by brute-force means. The robotics enthusiasts wanted to do everything with robots, which is not cost effective, and the heavy-machinery people tried to adapt techniques from ore mining to recycling. It turns out that a combination of those approaches, plus the air-jet optical sorter technology used for fruit and vegetable sorting, can do the whole job in a cost-effective way.
This is what production engineering is all about.
Really, the point of this demo is not to suggest Google could make a product. It’s to suggest if you keep applying to Google and get accepted on you 3rd / last try, then you will be invited to work on chat app infrastructure for 2 years while other dudes at the company are doing this depicted robot thing and you get to watch. Then after 2 years you might be invited to transfer to their team to clean up their chat app back-end. It’s all about recruiting, see?
[1] https://andgein.ru/blog/all/20-i-worked-at-google-for-10-day...
Instead of writing 100s of comments on HN, you could have done something that would have paid you money and used it to feed 100s of starving kids.
The #1 problem with recycling is that the cost to manufacture something like an aluminium can is about 5 cents. Recycling it has to be cheaper, otherwise it's a net harm to the environment. For example, if you spend just 10c on energy trucking the waste to a facility, sorting it, remelting it, and making a new can from the molten aluminium, then you've caused 5c more pollution than it would have required to just make a new one!
These energy balance equations are brutal. It's crazy difficult to recycle most packaging materials like plastics or aluminium cans cheaply enough to be beneficial. Currently, it's only truly worth it for more expensive metals like copper and steel, especially if they come in a bulk form. That's why you regularly see headlines like "90% of recycling goes into landfill".
And good luck getting re elected if such a policy has a noticeable impact on people's lives.
Socialise losses, privatise profits is unfortunately the current norm.
At one point they were handing out T-shirts saying 9 out of 10 PHDs
This is so different you might as well say mobility was a solved problem because we had horses.