Adaptive Intelligent Automation for Plastic Recycling

10 min readJul 21, 2021

Introduction

This is my personal side hustle project to get practice in AI & IoT field. The idea is to come up with an automated solution to perform sorting of the plastic items in plastic recycling industries which is otherwise done manually.

Product Executive Summary

As per WEF standards and agreements, many governments across the world are endorsing the sustainable development with conversation of energy and resources for future generations. Plastic recycling is one of the main goals that governments are looking forward to it and few governments such as US, UK, EU and India have taken the pledge to curb single use plastics by end of 2022.

Industries across the world have just started learning the recycling aspects and especially there is much more research and innovation yet to come in plastic recycling domain. Different start-ups and enterprises are working hard by taking different paths where some are taking non-IT based solutions and few are taking up IT based (using AI) solutions by recognizing their vast advantages & simplistic approaches compared to the former.

I acknowledge that there are some existing robotic sorting solutions (using AI) are already deployed in few recycling plants across the world, there is still a need to develop an indigenous, contextualized and economical solution using AI for plastic sorting that works for small scale and mid scale recycling companies in India and elsewhere. This idea is to develop an Adaptable Intelligent Automation for recycling plants that will improve the Operations efficiency and as well as potential for business revenue growth. The solution is cost-effective yet it is innovative in such a way that it is modular & distributed, adaptable & pluggable, cost-effective and replicable anywhere with minimum customization in similar recycling environments

Background

What Stakeholders in Plastic Recycling Plant have said?

Operations Manager, Plastic Recycling Plant, Hyderabad

I am facing severe challenge to hire people to do this dirty job which is not good for their health. Also I can’t ask for what I need from them but just accept and compromise what they can do. I can’t train them and losing the knowledge with the workers changed every month

Business Development Director, Plastic Recycling Plant, Hyderabad

I don’t have any visibility of my plant operations for plastic sorting and it is a serious challenge for me as I can’t showcase anything digitally for my customers and also plan for the better business outcomes regularly. There is heavy dependency on manual effort and that is impacting speed to market and I am unable to increase the production capacity of my plant for the final recycled products

Sorting Employee, Plastic Recycling Plant, Hyderabad

I am doing this job because I couldn’t find another job. This is a dirty job and I don’t want to do it anymore if I find another job next month. My hands get hurt regularly. Also I am not feeling safe to do this kind of work because these plastic waste will be covid infected and contaminated with all dirty stuff when collected from the source and during transit. This is only a temporary job for me for now to earn money for my living.

Challenges for Plastic Recycling Industries

Availability of Manual Employees: Currently manual employees are used to detect, filter and sort the input raw materials. This job is usually well-paid but it is health hazardous due to poisonous smells and gasses, exposure to chemical remains present in the items which leads to infections and allergic reactions, etc due to which the employees tend to leave after very few months. It is always highly challenging to find and hire the people who can do the mundane and tedious job.
Productivity Inefficiency: Due to the nature of the job, the productivity loss will be very high where the manual employees will not perform the mundane and repetitive job efficiently all the time. There is always good chance of manual errors which will lead to quality loss and inefficiency in the later phases of the recycling process and also for the final recycled product output.
Quality of Raw Plastic Waste Material: There is no guarantee that the suppliers will adhere to the given specifications and quality criteria due to various practical scenarios. In countries like India, getting the non-disposable plastic waste itself is big challenge as there is no waste separation process right from the source (households) itself. Hence getting the correct quality input raw waste material is not at all certain and there is very little that Recycling companies can do about it unless the whole waster collections and processing process is enhanced and matured by the Governments. Hence Recycling factories are at the mercy of suppliers and have to accept what they get from them as is without much choice
There is no data intelligence & insights available currently for the business to understand the operations efficiency for raw material processing such as: how much of the raw material has been wasted which leads to revenue leak ultimately; determine the quality loss and negotiate with the suppliers for the purchase and inventory cost optimization; impact on revenue and quality compromises for the final recycled products due to the inefficient raw material processing

Key Product Requirements

Requirement-1: As an Operations Manager in a plastic recycling plant, Can I overcome the challenges such as

Unavailability of manual workforce to do the plastic waste identification and sorting due to associated health hazards and it is dirty, tedious, not ergonomic, mind-numbing work and surrounded by unsanitary stuff
Productivity Leakage & Inefficiency due to mundane and repetitive work by manual employees
Identify the quality issues easily and early in the cycle in the raw plastic material supplied from the vendors

So that I can

Increase the quality of the final recycled product by improving the efficiency of raw material processing
Showcase the process efficiency & quality improvement enabled with the latest technology usage to increase the Brand value
Increase the speed to market to take competitive advantage and hence increase revenue
Employ the workforce to do much more valuable & productive work and hence avoid the health hazards

Requirement-2: As a Business Development Manager in a plastic recycling plant, Can I overcome the challenges such as

Manual workforce sourcing and retention due to heavy attrition all the time
Piling up of raw materials and landfilling due to slow manual sorting & ontime unavailability of manual workforce
Compromise on quality of recycled product due to inefficient manual sorting operations
Idle time in recycling production line due to low velocity & less accurate manual sorting

So that I can

[Quality Control]: Increase the quality of the final recycled product by improving the efficiency of raw material processing
[Efficiency & Brand Value] Showcase the process efficiency & quality improvement enabled with the latest technology usage to increase the Brand value
[Speed to Market] Reduce the sorting time and hence increase the throughput of final recycled product to market and hence increase revenue although there will be lower profit margins
[Cost Reduction] Reduce the inventory cost by quickly processing the raw materials

Requirement-3: As a Citizen Team, Can we come up with an innovative solution

To reduce the need for manual workforce to do the dirty and health hazardous job in plastic recycling
To allow the human workers to do better and valuable jobs than repetitive, health hazardous and mind-numbing work
To provide an efficient, automated and long-term solution for plastic sorting
To provide a reusable and extendible automated sorting mechanism

So that we can

Enable rapid production of secondary-use plastic pellets and hence contribute towards Conservation of Energy & Natural resources by injecting viable and sustainable alternative into the economy
Enhance the lives of the low-paid manual workers to do better jobs, earn better and save them from potential health hazards
Enable to create high quality secondary-use plastic pellets that are comparable to primary plastic by increasing the efficiency of plastic sorting
Reduce the landfilling by sorting accurately and faster using automated mechanism and hence avoid environment pollution near the site

What makes it Unique?

This idea is to develop a proprietary solution that is indigenous, cost-effective and contextualized to the given recycling environment (of plastic recycling) and achieve an automated, highly efficient and provide much better quality sorting for plastic recycling companies compared to human sorting.

The solutions available in US & EU are highly expensive which require heavy initial CapEX and they are being sold as wholistic solution (AI + Robotics + IoT + Analytics).

This model is unique in such a way that the solution will be available as PAYG model and require less CapEx but consider the optimal runtime/operations expenditure that too as per the usage.

This idea is to develop an Adaptable Intelligent Automation for recycling plants that will improve the Operations efficiency and as well as potential for business revenue growth.

The solution is cost-effective yet it is innovative in such a way that it is modular & distributed, adaptable & pluggable, cost-effective and replicable anywhere with minimum customization in similar recycling environments.

Product Mission

If we reduce the cost and increase the efficiency of sorting, the margin we can extract on recyclables increases eventually, and we can naturally find an incentive to capture more of that plastic waste material to recycle.. that’s the mission to enable the plastic recycling industries to process as much waste as possible to convert it into reusable source for manufacturing and ultimately contribute to sustainable development of the society.

Solution

Application Architecture

Component Architecture

Product Goals

Operations Benefits for Recycling Company

Operations Cost Saving: 25%
Reduction in Raw Material Processing Time: 100%
Reduction of Waste and associated cost: 30%
Real time and On-Demand Dashboards and Reports

Business Benefits for Plastic Recycling Company

Improvement in Speed to Market: 50%
Improvement in Quality of Output: 30%
Scale Out & Revenue Growth by attracting International
Customers: 10% growth

Engineering/Technology

Latency: roundtrip time from cameras to AI edge hub and edge Hub to robotics arm <= 1 min
Performance: Real Time processing of videos having 60fps with 1 minute duration
Efficiency: Day-0 (prototype) target: 50% accuracy

Project Execution

Research

Recycling robots (using AI) are still assisting humans, but companies have found that they can work two times as fast as humans. Industry leaders have developed robots that can identify different colors, textures, shapes, and sizes of plastic materials and make it easier to sort waste. For eg. AMP’s spider-like robot can pick up to 80 pieces of waste material per minute, twice the rate of an employee. Robotic sorters are not cheap, (eg. AMP robots are upto $300,000 or around $6,000 a month to lease), but those recycling centers are betting that the hefty capital expense will pay off with lower employment costs and higher efficiency. Forbes estimates lots of room for growth in recycling business: Recycling is a $6.2 billion (revenue) market in the U.S., and while the overall market has been growing at less than 2% a year, facilities are trying to figure out how to get more out of their waste, the majority of which still ends up in landfills.

Around 127 countries have adopted legislation on plastic bags, and many have introduced rules on single-use plastics more generally. Some countries have opted for taxes or waste-disposal fees on single-use plastics. Indian Government has a target to ban Single Use plastic by 2022 and hence the plastic recycling sector will have tremendous growth in the coming years in India. Hence it is very much essential to come up with an efficient, cost-effective and automated processing for plastic sorting which would be a boon for the companies in recycling industry and as well as economy in India and around the world.

There are very few companies across the world which are doing the recycling & waste management and can be counted on fingers which does the plastic recycling using Technology and as per Sustainable Development standards. Hence this idea and solution will pave a strategic path for TCS to enable Digital Transformation for the customers in Recycling Industry and hence a great opportunity to tap the large business potential due to the surge in demand for automatic sorting solutions that’s awaiting in coming 2 to 4 years.