2021 BRN Discussion, page-28026

So, recently I had the opportunity to visit one of the most modern construction-waste recycling facilities in the world, close to Zürich, Switzerland (https://eberhard.ch/ebimik). They have enourmous amounts of waste that is shredded, sorted and processed into a form in which they can sell it again at a cost as if it was new, so called primary material. All this is happening with fully automated sorting robots that put everything on the correct conveyor belt in a enormous system of conveyor belts. It was really impressive to see how fast all this happens and how clean and homogenous the end products are. Apparently they have some difficulties training their robots to properly identify the different material types in the time the robot has to pick up the particles from the conveyor belt. Apparently after several months they become sufficiently good to create products that are pure enough to be sold in certain quality categories (e.g. recycling gravel for concrete production with less than 1% other things than concrete in it).

Coming from the construction industry, i can tell you, the amounts of waste that are produced building and eliminating structures and infrastructures are mind blowing. Besides the ecological advantages of better recycling, a lot of densely populated areas are starting to have a serious problem with construction waste, because landfills are filling up and the distance that the this heavy waste has to be transported is ever increasing (cost) and the fees charged to deposit waste are increasing (cost) because the space is limited and taxes on waste are inreasing (cost) to make sure people dont create unneccessary waste. Buying primary material is also getting more expensive because new quarries are further away from the urban centers than the old ones. Obvioulsy rigorous recyling within large urban areas brings the opportunity of large savings… the better this is done the more profitable it gets, not just monetary wise but also in terms of energy and resource savings.

Having better sorting robots would certainly accelerate the process and increase the purity and thus the price of the recycled materials. Seeing how much construction waste there is and that there are now plans of several swiss landfill owners to dig up old waste to process and sell most of it to free up space and make money while doing that, makes me think that worldwide there will be a big demand in that type of robots…

I really don’t know much (or anything) about robotics, i just saw those machines in real and was impressed and it made me think of akidas recognition capability and fast on device learning… if you know someone that produces / develops those robots, maybe you can let them know about akida. Or if you know anyone from brainchip and think this could be useful information, you can let them know that this is an application where on a global scale they could sell millions of chips every year. I’m certain of it, at least about the part that within the next 10 years there will be tenthousands of such recycling plants worldwide. « Urban mining » is really a necessity for our civilisation and good sorting machines are a necessity for urban mining.

I’m not sure if that was interesting for anyone….
anyway, good luck!
best regards