Two Glacier methods at work in an MRF in Chicago. The robots can type as much as 45 gadgets per minute. | Supply: Areeb Malik, co-founder of Glacier, on LinkedIn
Glacier, which makes use of synthetic intelligence and robotics to effectively type recyclable supplies, right this moment introduced that it has raised $16 million in Sequence A funding. The corporate additionally mentioned Recology’s King County Materials Restoration Facility, or MRF, in Seattle has deployed a fleet of its AI recycling robots.
San Francisco-based Glacier mentioned 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 is just not 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, advised The Robotic Report. “The primary is simply to make our {hardware}, together with our robotic and our imaginative and prescient methods, more and more extra scalable and quicker to deploy.”
Glacier has assembled robots to sort out the unpredictable nature of recycling streams. Its laptop imaginative and prescient and AI know-how should determine and type over 30 various kinds of supplies, which might vary from frequent gadgets resembling PET plastic and aluminum cans to particular packaging varieties like toothpaste tubes, cat meals tins.
Glacier builds out knowledge flywheel
Hu-Thrams mentioned that Glacier has more and more been its recycling robots and AI knowledge as two components of the identical flywheel. The info makes the robots higher and extra correct, whereas the robots collect extra knowledge with each choose they make.
“What we’re actually targeted on now could be constructing out that flywheel and in addition understanding how we will harness that knowledge to unravel issues which will even be agnostic of what the robotic is straight away meant to deal with,” Thrams mentioned. “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 know Glacier’s long-term targets, you first want to know 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 mentioned.
“The job of that MRF is to principally to take that enormous pile of commingled recycling, a lot of which can be trash, and type it into constituent commodities as successfully as doable,” she defined. “So if the sorting course of have been excellent, you’ll find yourself with these stunning bales of paper, cardboard, plastics, aluminum cans, and so forth that these MRFs may promote to finish market producers to show into new stuff. Now, the sortation course of, as you possibly can most likely think about, is extraordinarily cumbersome. It’s very costly, as a result of a lot of it’s nonetheless really completed with handbook labor.”
MRFs expertise extraordinarily excessive ranges of turnover, and if most MRFs can’t discover the workforce, they will’t type the waste into usable supplies. Hu-Thrams mentioned 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, nevertheless, 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 supply a sure yield at a sure high quality charge, and do all the high quality inspection you anticipate out of a typical manufacturing plant,” Hu-Thrams mentioned. “And but, they’ve so many fewer instruments than one thing like a plastic bottling plant.”
“They nonetheless have a heavy reliance on handbook labor,” she added. “They nonetheless have little by means of knowledge at scale to assist them audit their processes and enhance effectivity. That’s actually the hole that Glacier is in search of to fill for them.”
Recycling poses sortation challenges
Glacier mentioned its robotic prices half as a lot as standard 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 troublesome to type. This has introduced many challenges for firms hoping to automate the method. First, earlier than Glacier, different recycling sortation methods used off-the-shelf robots, which have been sometimes too costly for the MRF, famous Hu-Thrams.
“Secondly, loads of these items have been simply bodily massive and really space-consuming in an surroundings that could be very space-constrained,” she added. “Think about a robotic that takes up the area of three to 4 sorters on a form line and does the job of 1.”
Lastly, MRFs, like manufacturing vegetation, dwell or die based mostly on their upstream,” Hu-Thrams mentioned. “This implies they require very dependable methods that may keep operating 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 mentioned. “How do you design a system that’s versatile sufficient to work successfully with that sort of materials stream? This is the reason we determined that purpose-built was the way in which to go.”
Glacier makes use of off-the-shelf parts from dependable OEMs, Hu-Thrams mentioned. The firm sourced these components independently to place collectively a robotic that’s compact, has a excessive uptime, and a quicker return on funding (ROI). In reality, Hu-Thrams mentioned quite a lot of Glacier’s clients have gotten their ROI in lower than a yr. For recycling, a three-year turnaround could be thought-about quick, she mentioned.
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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 clients’ wants first. That is true in relation to prices, uptime, cost fashions, clients’ rights to service their robots, and, maybe most significantly, AI.
“We’ll go to our recycling facility clients and ask them, what are the commodities, or the varieties of issues, that you just care essentially the most about?” Hu-Thrams mentioned. “We’ve really used that strategy to flesh out the way in which that we’re constructing our AI taxonomy.”
For instance, Glacier works to seek out methods for its clients to make use of their knowledge 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 a lot of clients utilizing the information as a standalone product, like a typical manufacturing plant,” Hu-Thrams mentioned.
“We’ve really helped quite a few clients determine and quantify as much as 1,000,000 {dollars} in incremental income they’re at the moment sending to the landfill yearly, after which we may help them fine-tune their plan and see real-time the place these modifications made any affect to their total restoration charge,” she continued.
Wanting ahead, Hu-Thrams mentioned that she hopes Glacier received’t simply be a robotics or an AI knowledge firm, but additionally a accomplice to assist recycling services resolve top-line points. For instance, if a buyer was having issues with contamination in its paper stream, then Glacier may set up imaginative and prescient methods and robots in strategic places to assist enhance its purity charge.
“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,” mentioned Hu-Thrams. “We give them this restoration instrument to truly be sure that they’re selecting in a specific means.”
