Two Glacier techniques at work in an MRF in Chicago. The robots can kind as much as 45 objects per minute. | Supply: Areeb Malik, co-founder of Glacier, on LinkedIn
Glacier, which makes use of synthetic intelligence and robotics to effectively kind recyclable supplies, right now introduced that it has raised $16 million in Collection A funding. The corporate additionally stated Recology’s King County Materials Restoration Facility, or MRF, in Seattle has deployed a fleet of its AI recycling robots.
San Francisco-based Glacier stated this funding caps a breakthrough interval throughout which it expanded its presence to markets together with San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, and Phoenix.
“The funding shouldn’t be solely an unimaginable testomony to this development trajectory that we’re on, on our quest to allow round manufacturing; however we’re utilizing the funding in a few notable methods,” Rebecca Hu-Thrams, co-founder and CEO of Glacier, informed The Robotic Report. “The primary is simply to make our {hardware}, together with our robotic and our imaginative and prescient techniques, more and more extra scalable and sooner to deploy.”
Glacier has assembled robots to sort out the unpredictable nature of recycling streams. Its pc imaginative and prescient and AI know-how should establish and kind over 30 various kinds of supplies, which may vary from frequent objects corresponding to PET plastic and aluminum cans to particular packaging sorts like toothpaste tubes, cat meals tins.
Glacier builds out information flywheel
Hu-Thrams stated that Glacier has more and more been taking a look at its recycling robots and AI information as two components of the identical flywheel. The info makes the robots higher and extra correct, whereas the robots collect extra information with each decide they make.
“What we’re actually targeted on now’s constructing out that flywheel and likewise understanding how we will harness that information to unravel issues that will even be agnostic of what the robotic is instantly meant to deal with,” Thrams stated. “Our final imaginative and prescient is for Glacier to turn into a instrument that may be an working system for these recycling services.”
The Ecosystem Integrity Fund (EIF) led the spherical. It additionally included participation from present buyers together with New Enterprise Associates (NEA), AlleyCorp, Overture Local weather VC, Amazon Local weather Pledge Fund, and VSC Ventures.
New buyers in Glacier included Elysium, Overlap Holdings, Cox Exponential, Alumni Ventures, One Small Planet, and Working Capital Fund.
Closing the round manufacturing loop
To grasp Glacier’s long-term objectives, you first want to grasp how the recycling worth chain works. It begins with placing recycling bins out on the curb. As soon as it’s there, the recyclables are picked up by a truck and brought to an MRF, Hu-Thrams stated.
“The job of that MRF is to mainly to take that enormous pile of commingled recycling, a lot of which can also be trash, and kind it into constituent commodities as successfully as doable,” she defined. “So if the sorting course of had been good, you’d find yourself with these lovely bales of paper, cardboard, plastics, aluminum cans, and so forth that these MRFs might promote to finish market producers to show into new stuff. Now, the sortation course of, as you possibly can in all probability think about, is extraordinarily cumbersome. It’s very costly, as a result of a lot of it’s nonetheless really executed with guide labor.”
MRFs expertise extraordinarily excessive ranges of turnover, and if most MRFs can’t discover the workforce, they’ll’t kind the waste into usable supplies. Hu-Thrams stated that Glacier is making an attempt to shut the loop in round manufacturing.
Ideally, supplies from recycling bins go to a facility, the place they’re damaged down into their particular person parts, repackaged, and delivered to a producing plant to be made into one thing else. Proper now, nonetheless, there’s a damaged hyperlink on this circle: the MRFs.
“Take into consideration what these MRFs are doing: They’re taking in feedstock, after which their job is to provide a sure yield at a sure high quality price, and do the entire high quality inspection you anticipate out of a typical manufacturing plant,” Hu-Thrams stated. “And but, they’ve so many fewer instruments than one thing like a plastic bottling plant.”
“They nonetheless have a heavy reliance on guide labor,” she added. “They nonetheless have little by means of information at scale to assist them audit their processes and enhance effectivity. That’s actually the hole that Glacier is searching for to fill for them.”
Recycling poses sortation challenges
Glacier stated its robotic prices half as a lot as typical choices and requires simply 3 ft. of conveyor area. | Supply: Glacier
MRFs are coping with an extremely heterogeneous stream of supplies which might be soiled and really tough to kind. This has offered many challenges for firms hoping to automate the method. First, earlier than Glacier, different recycling sortation techniques used off-the-shelf robots, which had been usually too costly for the MRF, famous Hu-Thrams.
“Secondly, numerous these models had been simply bodily massive and really space-consuming in an setting that may be very space-constrained,” she added. “Think about a robotic that takes up the area of three to 4 sorters on a kind line and does the job of 1.”
Lastly, MRFs, like manufacturing vegetation, reside or die based mostly on their upstream,” Hu-Thrams stated. “This implies they require very dependable techniques that may keep working regardless of the extremely variable materials stream.
“They’re not simply processing bottles and cans and paper, but additionally seeing issues like Christmas lights and surfboards and microwaves and automotive motors and even issues like weapons and hand grenades,” she stated. “How do you design a system that’s versatile sufficient to work successfully with that type of materials stream? For this reason we determined that purpose-built was the best way to go.”
Glacier makes use of off-the-shelf parts from dependable OEMs, Hu-Thrams stated. The firm sourced these components independently to place collectively a robotic that’s compact, has a excessive uptime, and a sooner return on funding (ROI). In truth, Hu-Thrams stated plenty of Glacier’s prospects have gotten their ROI in lower than a 12 months. For recycling, a three-year turnaround could be thought of quick, she stated.
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Glacier helps MRFs get essentially the most from the information it gathers
All through our dialog, Hu-Thrams emphasised Glacier’s dedication to placing its prospects’ wants first. That is true with regards to prices, uptime, cost fashions, prospects’ rights to service their robots, and, maybe most significantly, AI.
“We’ll go to our recycling facility prospects and ask them, what are the commodities, or the forms of issues, that you simply care essentially the most about?” Hu-Thrams stated. “We’ve really used that method to flesh out the best way that we’re constructing our AI taxonomy.”
For instance, Glacier works to seek out methods for its prospects to make use of their information to enhance the general effectivity of the plant. “As we’ve grown out our database and as we’ve grown out the capabilities of AI, we’re really seeing numerous prospects utilizing the information as a standalone product, like a typical manufacturing plant,” Hu-Thrams stated.
“We’ve really helped quite a few prospects establish and quantify as much as one million {dollars} in incremental income they’re at the moment sending to the landfill yearly, after which we might help them fine-tune their plan and see real-time the place these modifications made any impression to their total restoration price,” she continued.
Trying ahead, Hu-Thrams stated that she hopes Glacier received’t simply be a robotics or an AI information firm, but additionally a associate to assist recycling services remedy top-line points. For instance, if a buyer was having issues with contamination in its paper stream, then Glacier might set up imaginative and prescient techniques and robots in strategic places to assist enhance its purity price.
“We now, maybe for the primary time, can actually assist these services perceive in actual time, on the merchandise degree, what’s entering into, what’s popping out of their bales, and what’s being ejected to the landfill,” stated Hu-Thrams. “We give them this restoration instrument to truly be sure that they’re selecting in a selected manner.”