ALBANY — Soon enough, a team of robots will be sorting plastics at the Evergreen recycling facility.
The company recently expanded its partnership with AMP Robotics to have three robots installed at its Fuller Road plant to sort out green and clear plastics by mid-2022, a news release announced.
The technology, driven by artificial intelligence, is said to sort soft drink bottles at speeds “up to three times faster and at a higher accuracy rate” than manual sorters.
Evergreen then recycles the materials and sells them to markets as feedstock for new containers and packaging, the release said.
The recycling company opened in Ohio in 1998 but expanded in 2021 acquiring three more locations, including the plant in Albany formerly known as UltrePET. A total of 15 AMP robots will be used across Evergreen’s recycling centers.
Evergreen said it saw a “notable improvement” in purity and an increase of about 200 percent in pick rates, or how many items are sorted per minute. The Ohio center recorded robots were removing up to 90 percent of contamination across the different recycling lines.
With robots in play, the Albany facility can reassign team members to other jobs, away from the tedious sorting process, amid the tight labor market.
“We want to recover all we can, and with AMP’s technology, we are — thereby helping to supply a higher-quality end product and a larger volume of recycled plastic for brands to source for their recycled content goals and sustainability commitments,” Greg Johnson, Evergreen’s general manager said in the release.
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