As consumers increasingly demand environmentally friendly and sustainable products, companies strive to seek alternative solutions, which creates a market ripe for growth for some environmental tech companies’ offerings. One example is Samsara Eco, an Australia-based startup that makes and sells fossil-free polymer resins to its customers. These resins can be integrated into supply chains and […]
Inside Apple’s efforts to build a better recycling robot
Last week, TechCrunch paid a visit to Apple’s Austin, Texas manufacturing facilities. Since 2013, the company has built its Mac Pro desktop about 20 minutes north of downtown. The 400,000 square foot facility sits in a maze of industry parks, a quick trip south from the company’s in-progress corporate campus. In recent years, the capital […]
Glacier is training AI-powered recycling robots
The future of recycling is here, and of course, it involves robots and artificial intelligence. Rebecca Hu, the co-founder of the robotics company Glacier, creates robots that help recycling plants separate and, well, recycle material. Before, sorting recyclable materials was a manual job that took hours for someone to do. Today, Glacier has been using […]
Amazon teams with recycling robot firm to track package waste
Amazon generate a lot of trash. Precisely how much is a matter of some debate. In 2021, the company says it used 214 million or so pounds of single-use plastic in its packaging. Nonprofit ocean conservation firm Oceana, on the other hand, put that figure at approximately ~700 million pounds. That’s a huge gulf, but […]
UK AI startup Greyparrot bags strategic tie-up with recycling giant Bollegraaf
In another sign of the scramble to accelerate the uptake and transformative potential of artificial intelligence, Dutch recycling giant Bollegraaf Group is making a strategic investment in UK AI startup Greyparrot, which uses computer vision for waste analytics. The veteran manufacturer of MRFs (Material Recovery Facilities) and “turnkey” recycling systems — which was originally founded as […]