Updated: Amp Robotics developing AI solution to improve film, flexible packaging recovery

Amp Robotics Corp., Denver, is developing an automated system powered by artificial intelligence (AI) that it says will help material recovery facilities (MRFs) avoid film contamination as they sort film and flexible packaging.

Named Amp Vortex, the company says it has started its prerelease to the market, working with initial customers on deployment. Amp says it expects Vortex to be in full production in 2023.

Amp says the recycling industry lacks infrastructure for the identification and separation of film and flexible packaging, and the materials jam MRF equipment that is not designed to handle it. It estimates that even 2 percent to 3 percent film in overall MRF streams can be unmanageable to remove manually, often damaging equipment and causing downtimes that hinder the recovery of recyclables. Amp says film and flexible packaging can find their way into every line in a MRF, resulting in high levels of contamination.

In addition, the company says that because they are lightweight, most of these materials make their way onto fiber lines. Film contamination can degrade fiber bale purity, leading to revenue loss or the need for additional postprocessing downstream.

“Film has long been an issue for MRFs around the world, significantly impacting the maintenance of screens and the quality of recovered material—fiber in particular,” Amp CEO Matanya Horowitz told Recycling Today. “In some of our robotics applications, the robots are seeing an astonishing amount of film.”

He adds, “We saw that a solution that could be deployed with little retrofit would have broad applicability. It’s rare I see a MRF that doesn’t have a challenge or headache dealing with film somewhere in the system; more typically its multiple places in the system.”

The Amp Vortex system can be deployed as a retrofit solution in various configurations to accommodate different belt sizes and inclines and targets film contamination and is initially optimized for quality control on fiber lines, according to Amp.

“Innovation and infrastructure improvements are vital to helping MRFs process this challenging, prolific material type and increase recycling rates for residential film and flexible packaging,” Horowitz says. “AI is laying the groundwork to reduce the contamination burden on MRFs and scale the recycling of film and flexible packaging.”

Amp is developing Vortex to target and recover film and flexible packaging for baling and selling, which it says is a response to an increase in major brands making commitments to using more recycled content in their products, along with states adopting laws aimed at ramping up the use of postconsumer resin in plastic products and packaging.

“With our latest technology innovation for more efficient, profitable recycling operations, we aim to boost recovery and drive demand for products manufactured from recycled film and flexibles to develop and support end markets,” Amp Senior Director of Product Amanda Marrs says. “This effort is key to addressing the plastic waste crisis and diverting millions of tons of recoverable material from landfills annually.”

The system was first developed through Amp’s Customer Innovation Program, which focuses on collaborating with industry stakeholders to develop new AI-enabled automation applications for the recycling industry. Amp says that Vortex is among a portfolio of new products and performance features it is developing for pilot and commercial release in support of increased recycling efficiency and improved cost-effectiveness for MRFs and converters.

Vortex has been tested in the company’s in-house test center, but Horowitz says Amp will deploy it in three real-world sites before the end of the year. He says the system has been tested on a real fiber line, container line and with other materials and notes its doing what the company expected by “removing significant volumes of film quickly, with little change to the existing material stream.”

“Some of our best ideas evolve over time,” Horowitz says. “The early ideas around Vortex came from picking small polypropylene containers. It was in the background until roughly the last year when we started really focusing on it.”

He says elements in the Vortex technology already are found in its grippers, which have proven to have the highest pick success, and adds that Amp has an even higher achieving upgrade coming for many applications.

“We learned the ideas behind vacuum flow, how to prevent clogging and more from our experimentation around Vortex,” Horowitz says. “There are many different ways to ‘version’ some of our core technology ideas, namely that AI enables new types of sorting devices for the recycling industry.”

The technology offers the ability to capture film, even if initially it goes to residue, Horowitz says, and anticipates demand will be easier to catalyze since Vortex solves the issue of how to remove film economically. Now, he says, it’s only a question of if demand is sufficient in the end market to make storage and shipment worthwhile for a give MRF.

“Here we have an application that can be uniquely solved by the combination of AI with recycling-specific automation,” Horowitz says. “This hardware doesn’t work well with other forms of sensing. This is just the beginning of AI-enabled sorting mechanisms specific to the recycling industry rather than adopted from existing robotics domains.”