The Obtain: Automating warehouse duties, and issues with recycling plastics

Earlier than nearly any merchandise reaches your door, it traverses the worldwide provide chain on a pallet. Greater than 2 billion pallets are in circulation in the USA alone, and $400 billion price of products are exported on them yearly.

Nevertheless, loading packing containers onto these pallets is a activity caught up to now: Heavy hundreds and repetitive actions go away staff at excessive threat of damage, and within the uncommon cases when robots are used, they take months to program utilizing handheld computer systems which have modified little for the reason that Nineteen Eighties.

Jacobi Robotics, a startup spun out of the labs of the College of California, Berkeley, says it could vastly pace up that course of with AI. If profitable, Jacobi goals to interchange the legacy strategies prospects are at present utilizing to coach their bots, whittling down the time it takes to code a paletting course of from months to a single day. Learn the total story.

—James O’Donnell

Right here’s the issue with new plastic recycling strategies

Look on the underside of a plastic water bottle or takeout container, and also you would possibly discover a emblem there made up of three arrows forming a closed loop formed like a triangle. Typically referred to as the chasing arrows, this stamp is used on packaging to recommend it’s recyclable.

These little arrows indicate a pleasant story, portray an image of a world the place the fabric will likely be recycled into a brand new product, forming an countless loop of reuse. However the actuality of plastics recycling in the present day doesn’t match as much as that concept. Solely about 10% of the plastic ever made has been recycled; the overwhelming majority winds up in landfills or within the atmosphere. 

Researchers have been working to handle the issue by arising with new recycling strategies, typically referred to as superior, or chemical, recycling. However this new strategy shares a couple of challenges with different recycling strategies. Learn the total story.

—Casey Crownhart