As climate change, sustainability, and corporate social responsibility become of increased importance for brands across the globe, business, and communications professionals should keep an eye on how emerging technologies, like AI, are being used to solve real-world problems. Some of the problems AI is solving today are right out of science fiction movies. Waste recognition, space junk, and sustainability are a few of the challenges that artificial intelligence is helping humanity tackle.
Many dystopian movies depict Earth covered in garbage. People live in slums surrounded by trash without anywhere else for it to go. Thankfully, with the help of companies like Greyparrot, that dystopian predicament doesn’t have to be humanity’s future. Greyparrot is an artificial intelligence company devoted to “using AI-powered computer vision software to increase transparency and automation in recycling.”
As consumers become more concerned about product sustainability, plus increasing government regulations, companies are finding new ways to create a circular economy. The circular economy is a “framework for an economy that is restorative and regenerative by design.” It’s a process of designing waste out of an economic system so that a product has a continued life, even after its main use. This is key for the waste and recycling industry which has low economic rates of 14% globally because “60% of the solid waste produced each year ends up in open dumps and landfill[s].”
Greyparrot AI helps companies work in a circular economy by highlighting inefficiencies in sorting and waste facilities. The artificial intelligence vision can spot items on a conveyer belt faster and with better accuracy than a human. Their system “automatically identifies different types of waste, providing composition information and analytics to help facilities increase recycling rates.” AI is easy to scale and provides real-time insight and analysis into facilities. AI can turn the 1% of waste that is monitored and analyzed into 100%. Not to mention the opportunities to partner with smart bins and sorting robots. Greyparrot AI does more than bring waste management into the 21st century, it opens the door to AI applications to less well-known sectors of the economy, making our future circular instead of dystopian.