In a hangar-like building in Louisville, Colorado, outside Denver, crumpled plastic bottles, cans and other scraps were strewn across a giant conveyor belt. But you know what they say about one man’s trash.

At AMP, a company that builds artificial intelligence-powered recycling systems, founder Matanya Horowitz has another way of describing the material: “That’s our data, that’s our fuel,” he said. “But yes, that’s garbage.”

In the United States, only about 20% of recyclable material in our household waste actually gets recycled, according to the Recycling Partnership, an advocacy group. One reason, Horowitz said, is because it costs more to recycle some materials than the end-product is worth. AMP’s aim is to increase that rate by using computer vision and robotics to more quickly, and cheaply, sort recyclables from the waste stream.

“All of these different things that we put in the recycling or the garbage, they actually do have value,” said Horowitz. “The problem has been that the cost of sorting a lot of these materials out has been too high.”

Before demonstrating AMP’s “smart sortation” system, Horowitz explained the process. The stream of garbage on the conveyor belt would pass under a pair of security cameras, which would take photos of the material. Then, a computer trained on millions of images of trash would identify different types of recyclable plastic in the photos, and send a message to sort the plastic, using pneumatic jets.

“What we do is we accelerate the material and then throw it off the end of a conveyor belt, and it creates almost a garbage waterfall,” Horowitz said. “Behind the waterfall, we have a couple air jets, and the air jets just use a little puff of air to punch out the material.”

A warning indicator beeped, and the system roared to life. As the stream of waste poured down from one conveyor belt to the waterfall below, puffs of air sent some items up into one of two compartments. 

“This is our double jet, so it's sorting two commodities at once,” Horowitz explained. “No. 1 plastics are going on the bottom. No. 2 plastics, which are milk jugs, up top.”

The velocity was impressive — and loud.

“It's pretty strong,” Horowitz said. “It can move like phone books and things like that.” 

Scary to watch, but much safer and less tedious than sorting it by hand, Horowitz said. Sorting jobs at recycling plants are notoriously hard to fill. And the system is also far faster.

“If you you or me were to do this sorting ourselves, we would do about 40 picks a minute, and honestly, after an hour or two, we'll get pretty tired,” he said. “These jet devices will do thousands of picks a minute.”

And that means higher recovery rates at a lower cost.

For this demo, AMP’s system was just sorting plastic from material sent for testing from its facility in Cleveland. But the technology can identify and divert pretty much anything from the waste stream. AMP has also developed a process to convert organic material, which would otherwise rot in the landfill and produce methane — think food scraps or greasy pizza boxes — into something called biochar.

“We put it through a process called pyrolysis,” Horowitz said. “It's basically the process they use to make charcoal.” 

The biochar can be used to make concrete, or added to soil in agriculture, sequestering carbon that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming.

AMP recently announced a new 20-year contract in southeastern Virginia to process solid waste for eight communities, with a guarantee to divert 50% of waste from the landfill — 30% in the form of organics and 20% recyclables.

Dennis Bagley, executive director of the Southeastern Public Service Authority in Chesapeake, Virginia, said the region’s landfill was on track to fill up by 2060, with no available options for a new site. He said the deal with AMP will extend the landfill’s life by another 35 years and eliminate the need for separate curbside recycling. The area’s current recycling rate is only about 7%.

“I have a philosophy that Americans are inherently lazy and they don't recycle because it takes effort,” Bagley said. “What this does is takes that element out, so everybody becomes a recycler.”

Whether there’s a market for all that recycled material is another challenge. 

“Ultimately, it still depends on the entity on the other side of that supply chain to make the decision to purchase those materials,” said Bryan Staley, president and CEO of the Environmental Research and Education Foundation, which advocates for more sustainable waste management practices.

Extended producer responsibility laws, which several states have passed, could help by shifting the cost of dealing with packaging after it’s used to producers and requiring minimum levels of recycled content. Colorado’s program will help pay for a new recycling facility near Denver opening next year using AMP’s AI technology.