Rumpke Waste & Recycling has invested more than $2 million in the latest recycling technology: artificial intelligence robots that can recover specific objects from the plant line. Molly Yeager, corporate communications manager at Rumpke, said the new technology shows a growing commitment to expand recycling. “Now that the U.S. markets are coming forward with new ideas and new ways to recover recycled material, and that started happening in 2018, we (Rumpke) started thinking about how we can help. So you’re seeing more and more companies pop up wanting to use this recycled material. We have a lot of domestic markets available to us now,” Yeager said.
In 2018, China announced a ban on all imports of plastic. Before the ban, China was the world’s biggest recyclables buyer, taking in 60 percent of plastic waste and manufacturing it into sellable raw materials, according to USA Today. But a lot of the plastic sent to China was contaminated and wound up in landfills — leading to their government’s decision to stop all plastic imports. Yeager said since that plastic ban; they’ve seen a considerable increase in demand for recyclable materials from end-users in the United States, such as polypropylene, the No. 5 plastics. She explained that plastic is most commonly found in tubs used for food storage like margarine and yogurt.
The new robots installed at their Saint Bernard recycling center are dedicated to pulling No. 5 plastics off the plant line. “It’s aided in the recovering of tubs. Before that, it was handpicking. So it is allowing us to get more tubs off the line and make sure we’re recovering as many tubs as we possibly can,” Yeager said.