Contamination

Robot combines Hyperspectral vision with Artificial Intelligence for residential recycling

Last December (2020), Bluewater Recycling Association (BRA) broke new ground in Ontario residential recycling processing by installing six new Artificial Intelligence (A.I.)-enabled robotic arms in their Material Recovery Facility (MRF). The investment was driven by the need to reduce reliance on hard-to-retain manual sorters and deal with a material mix...

Next Generation Technologies: RFID for a targeted approach to Promotion & Education

Municipal recycling costs have continued to increase annually, due to the increasing complexity and light-weighting of the packaging supplied into the market. Sorting challenges and confusion amongst residents is growing as packaging becomes more complex and multi-layered. In turn, this contributes to higher contamination rates and higher net system costs. [ultimate_spacer height="20"] The...

The bagged recyclables dilemma

Faced with a new processing RFP, Dufferin County sought to understand the costs to manage increasing amounts of bagged recyclables, and whether it would be more cost-effective to debag at the curb or process bagged materials at the MRF. Dufferin provides single stream recycling collection in Blue Boxes, with the...

The potential of small upgrades to make a big difference

Responding to the need to clean up their fibre commodities to meet the increasingly higher demands of the end markets, EWSWA decided to upgrade their fibre line by installing an optical sorter to remove “browns” (cardboard and boxboard), containers and other contamination from its newsprint bales (Sorted Residential Paper #56...