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BROOKLYN, New York—A conveyor belt is keeping material flying past at speeds that require both concentration and rapid eye movement if you wanted to track a single item. Above the constant roar of all the heavy equipment, it's just possible to make out the brief hissing of jets of high-pressure air. Those jets are produced where the conveyor belt ends, and most of the material plunges onto a second belt below. Each hiss, however, causes a carefully chosen item to leap off the end of the belt and soar into a different collection area, where yet another conveyor belt takes it on its way.
The process of carefully choosing which items to sift out is all done without human intervention. It's based on how that object reflects light that's outside the range of human vision.
All this is happening within just one of a dozen stations inside a modern recycling center, each of which isolates a single class of materials based on their physical properties. Over the last several decades, recycling has gone from a manual process to an extremely automated one, where things like infrared sensors and small jets of air mix with massive front-end loaders and enormous material balers.
A lot of technological innovation has gone into figuring out how to take a chaotic mix of items and separate it into relatively pure streams of materials. But being able to do so isn't enough—it has to be made into a sustainable business. So today, a lot of the innovation that is taking place in the recycling industry must dually focus on the economics.
Full Story: Bikes, bowling balls, and the delicate balancing act that is modern recycling | Ars Technica
The process of carefully choosing which items to sift out is all done without human intervention. It's based on how that object reflects light that's outside the range of human vision.
All this is happening within just one of a dozen stations inside a modern recycling center, each of which isolates a single class of materials based on their physical properties. Over the last several decades, recycling has gone from a manual process to an extremely automated one, where things like infrared sensors and small jets of air mix with massive front-end loaders and enormous material balers.
A lot of technological innovation has gone into figuring out how to take a chaotic mix of items and separate it into relatively pure streams of materials. But being able to do so isn't enough—it has to be made into a sustainable business. So today, a lot of the innovation that is taking place in the recycling industry must dually focus on the economics.
Full Story: Bikes, bowling balls, and the delicate balancing act that is modern recycling | Ars Technica
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