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Podcast With EverestLabs: The Future of Recycling - AI and Robotics
69 Plays8 months ago
In this podcast episode, we're focusing on the transformative role of AI and robotics in revolutionizing the recycling industry. This isn't just about machines taking over traditional tasks; it's a story of how cutting-edge technology is enabling us to tackle one of our planet's most pressing issues - packaging waste.
We'll explore how artificial intelligence and advanced robotics are making recycling processes more efficient, accurate, and cost-effective. We'll look at the challenges the recycling sector faces, from sorting complexities to operational inefficiencies, and how technology offers innovative solutions.
📚 RESOURCES & LINKS
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- EverlastLabs Website: https://everestlabs.ai
- EverlastLabs LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/everestlabsai/
- EverlastLabs Twitter: https://twitter.com/EverestLabs_ai
Guest: Apurba Pradhan, Head of Product and Marketing at EverestLabs
👉 Interview with Apurba: https://www.npws.net/podcast/future-of-recycling-ai
🌍 SUSTAINABILITY PODCAST CREATED BY NEW PERSPECTIVE
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This podcast is proudly sponsored by New Perspective Marketing, a dynamic growth marketing agency in Boston, MA, celebrating 20 years in business. We help sustainably focused B2B organizations grow their brands and scale up revenue. If you or your organization is looking to grow, visit npws.com for more info.
- Host: Dunja Jovanovic
- Executive Producer: Marko Bodiroza
- Creator: Nathan Harris
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello there and welcome to another episode of the Green New Perspective podcast. I am thrilled that you're here because that means that we share curiosity on cutting-edge technologies aimed at combating climate change. And if you're new to our channel, consider subscribing on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Zancaster or wherever you stream your podcasts because we have a treasured role of over 20 episodes featuring guest generators
00:00:24
Speaker
from all over the clinic tech, nature tech, agri tech and biotech space.
Low Recycling Rates: The Challenge
00:00:29
Speaker
When this episode is no different, we are talking about recycling. So it's no surprise that recycling rates are disappointingly low worldwide and US is no different. So we invited Everless Labs, a company that utilizes AI, data analytics and robotics to ramp up the recycling rates. So if you want to know how technology can help us recycle better, stay tuned.
Everest Labs: Innovating in Recycling
00:01:02
Speaker
Hi and welcome to the Green New Perspective podcast. Can you introduce yourselves to our audience and then give us a bit of an overview of what Everlast Lab is and what you do? Thanks for having me. My name is Zaporba. I run products for a company called Everest Labs here in Silicon Valley. We're an AI company that's focused on packaging waste and eliminating packaging waste. We apply technology, AI technology,
00:01:31
Speaker
automation technologies like robotics that help recyclers do a much, much better job of recycling packaging waste through their facilities and put materials back into the supply chain to sort of foster the circular economy.
00:01:46
Speaker
And yeah, we've been in business since 2018. We really started scaling our products about a year and a half ago, and we're getting some really good traction, especially in North America around deploying AI and robotics in recycling facilities. And I look forward to talking to you about it. And what kind of packaging waste are you recycling?
Understanding Packaging Waste
00:02:05
Speaker
Yeah, good question. So in the US, you know, something like a third of waste generated is packaging waste. So how the EPA defines packaging waste is waste that is thrown away within the year of the product being bought. So these are all the things that are
00:02:23
Speaker
sort of packaging the everyday items, so aluminum cans, cardboard boxes, plastic bottles, food containers, shampoo detergent bottles. All of these are sort of consumer products that use these types of packaging. And ideally, all of this should be completely recycled and put back into the supply chain. You know, we have complete control over what materials we use.
00:02:48
Speaker
how we collect them, how we sort them, how we put them back.
Recycling Inefficiencies and Opportunities
00:02:52
Speaker
But because of operational inefficiencies and because of economics around recycling, that's not happening. A majority of these products are landfilled or end up in oceans. So that's the problem we're trying to solve. And what inspired you to tackle this massive problem?
00:03:07
Speaker
Yeah, so the credit goes to our founder, JD Ambati. He founded Everest Labs in 2018, you know, really to tackle this big problem of packaging waste. It's one of the bigger problems facing us in terms of sustainability. So that's why he named the company Everest Labs. Everest as in, you know, large is overcoming a large problem and then labs is really just being experimental in nature, how we solve these problems, right? Like I said, you know,
00:03:35
Speaker
A lot of these materials should be recycled. We have a lot of incentive to do so from a sustainability perspective, but also from an economic perspective, right? If you take something like aluminum, I think it takes something like a tenth of the energy to recycle aluminum versus produce new aluminum cans. So there's a lot of energy being wasted in mining and making new materials.
00:04:01
Speaker
which can be avoided. Same with things like tin and stainless steel. Plastics is another one. I think only about 10% of packaging waste that we use as plastics is put back into the economy. The rest is landfill to end up in oceans. This is a huge problem and a problem that needs to be solved. You are using AI, well, AI-powered operating system to help make the change.
AI and Robotics in Recycling
00:04:26
Speaker
Can you tell me how does that works?
00:04:29
Speaker
Yeah, sure, happy to do so. We use AI to help recyclers do two things. One is operate their facilities with data. And then the second is to automate their sorting fit processes. And when I say automate with data, if you think of a recycling facility as sort of a manufacturing process, they are running their facilities without any data into that process.
00:04:53
Speaker
What material comes into a recycling facility? How does it go through each stages of sortation? At the end, what did you recover? All of that data is very manual and very collected, very infrequently. And so they don't have real time data to help them sort of optimize their plants. And there's a huge amount of efficiency in terms of how much material you recover and how much material you put back into the system that could be gained by using data to know how to operate these facilities.
00:05:23
Speaker
Second is a lot of the processes are manual. So when you go to a recycling facility, it goes through a series of conveyor belts. And there's usually people at the end of these lines, even in developed countries like the US, all throughout Europe, people are still sorting these things manually. There are people standing at the end of these lines wearing hazmat suit type clothing, picking out bottles and cans and plastic containers out of these recycling streams, which then ultimately end up in landfill.
00:05:52
Speaker
And that's a very inefficient process. So we introduce robotics, very, very flexible, very high speed sortation robotics that do the job. And initially, you know, one of the big challenges that these recyclers have is hiring people to do this kind of job because you can see it's a very demanding job that has a lot of repetitive motion and
00:06:13
Speaker
and very sort of high demand on sort of your physical body. And so people over time are just not very good at these types of jobs. And so we introduced robotics that can work 24 seven that have a high success rate to do that. And when you combine those two things, the recycling facilities can now capture a lot more material at a much lower cost, which means they can put these materials back into the supply chain at an economics that makes sense for it to kind of go through the whole recycling process.
00:06:41
Speaker
And what impact have you seen so far? Lots of impacts. I mean, there are sort of impacts. We help boost recovery so we can, robotics can sort at least as good as people, typically about two or three times better. So the recovery at each step of the process can be two or three times higher.
00:07:02
Speaker
We help landfill less. So if you deploy our technology throughout the facility, typically companies can reduce how much they're landfilling by 30 to 50%. So almost a third or half of what they were originally putting into landfill. And because you're not putting things to landfill, you're making money out of it, right? So you're basically selling that back into the commodity market. So that increases your revenue base as well.
00:07:28
Speaker
We also can improve the availability of suppliers for downstream recycling companies. So how recycling works is there's usually a recycling company that sort, you know, collect the things from household and commercial waste. They sort it.
00:07:44
Speaker
They have facilities called MRFs, material recovery facilities. As I mentioned, we help boost recovery, lower costs, less landfill. Then downstream, there are people called reprocessors or reclaimers who are buying those commodities and turning them into feedstock, turning them into materials that you can then make packaging out of again.
00:08:05
Speaker
Those companies have a different problem. Those companies have a problem of not being able to buy enough supply of good recycle content because the MERS, the recycling facilities can't provide enough. For those reprocesses and reclaimers, we help them by applying AI technology to their supply chain.
00:08:25
Speaker
to their feed-in-feed material to help them decide the quality of material that's coming in and also be able to expand their supply base so we can help those companies reduce their costs of in-feed by almost 2x. So there's a lot of benefits AI and robotics can provide across this value chain. Well, thank you. So I've recently read that you raised like $16 million in Series A funding.
Funding and Partnerships
00:08:49
Speaker
So what kind of things we focus on with this new injection of funds?
00:08:53
Speaker
that in focus is fine. The Series A funding was last year. So it's, it's been a little bit over a year that we raised our schools. It's an old news. A little bit of an old news, but we've used that funding to really prove out the value of our technology with
00:09:12
Speaker
recycling facilities. So we provide a solution that often pays back based on the labor savings, based on the increased recovery, less than six months of purchase for the recycling facilities. And we've proven that for small recycling companies, so companies that operate one, two,
00:09:31
Speaker
Recycling plants, we've proven that with the largest recycling companies that operate in a 60, 80, 100 plants. So we've proven the value of the technology across that recycling spectrum of recycling companies. We have customers, we have about 50 sites that were deployed in now. We have proven the economics of our solution across these sites.
00:09:53
Speaker
And so that's what we did with Series A funding is really sort of scale, approve the value for a product and start to scale it. Now, the next stage for our company is really just to scale our commercial and go-to-market operations. So we can repeat this process across all recycling companies in the U.S., starting in the U.S., but also looking at globally.
00:10:13
Speaker
Are there other collaborators or partners that you could share with us within the sustainability space? We don't have any commercial or go-to-market partners. We sell directly into recycling facilities. We do have partners on the technology side of things. We work with some of the best companies that manufacture industrial robotics, a company in Japan called Fanuc.
00:10:36
Speaker
We use Nvidia and Intel products for processing our AI. We are looking as we expand into sort of international markets. We are looking at, you know, can we find partners commercial who can help us commercially to take our products into different geographies, but nothing that we've really announced yet.
00:10:54
Speaker
And where do you see Everlast Lab in three to five years? And how do you see your operating system evolving? Like I said, we're a technology company. We have labs in our name. We're very experimental in nature. We're bringing up new technologies and making our current set of products better. So our AI and robotics will continue to get better. We'll make our AI more accurate.
00:11:18
Speaker
identify more materials as the market evolves. We'll be able to pick materials faster. We'll be able to occupy more and more sorting positions within a facility. Within a facility, there's different types of sorting that happens. Currently, we can address about three out of the five. We'll be able to address all five different sorting positions in a few years.
00:11:44
Speaker
But on top of that, I think where we see the biggest opportunities are around the data opportunities. So data that powers MIRFs to be able to not just what I mentioned optimize their operations, but also meet compliance and increasing regulations, right?
Optimizing Operations with Data
00:12:03
Speaker
Recyclers face a lot of
00:12:05
Speaker
audits based on what the municipality wants or now as we evolve into sort of more of a producer funded model for recycling, what the producers want to see. They want to see object by object data of what's passing through a recycling facility. They don't have means to do that right now. And we can provide the data to be able to do that. The data can also power the supply chain.
00:12:28
Speaker
right, going from, as I mentioned, recycling facilities into reclaimers and reprocessors back into the packaging manufacturers. That supply chain has very little visibility in terms of the quality of the material and the supply of material, and therefore that whole process is somewhat inefficient. Having data at each step along the process and providing visibility into the whole supply chain makes the whole transaction a lot more smoother so data can help sort of create a transparent market for the recycled commodities.
00:12:57
Speaker
We can also help packaging manufacturers and brands understand the life cycle of the products that they put out there. So packaging manufacturers can do a better job of designing products, understanding where they end up, whether they end up in landfills, recycling facilities. If in recycling facilities, where did it end up? We can help them track their sustainable packaging goals. So there's a lot of opportunities for the data that we're generating across this value chain, and that's where we think they're the biggest opportunities.
00:13:27
Speaker
And where do you see challenges considering that the recycling rates are still low? Yeah, I think the biggest challenge really is just an efficient recycling market, right? The biggest issues is really the lack of high quality recycle content. And like I said, that stems from the fact that the recyclers can't sort these things at a low enough cost because they are very high cost.
00:13:52
Speaker
the processors can't buy enough of these materials and therefore these materials can't compete with virgin plastics, virgin aluminum, at the price points that it needs to. While there's huge demand for recycled content like consumers and brands are now really focused on asking for more recycled content in their packaging material, more recyclability of their packaging material.
00:14:17
Speaker
the supply chain is broken. And so I think that is really just the biggest challenge is how do you fix each step of that supply chain so that, you know, ultimately the packaging manufacturers can meet the demand for sustainability. I really do think that's the biggest issue facing recycling today. I mean, there are other challenges like consumer behavior and
00:14:38
Speaker
and around recycling. But those will fix itself as the economics is there. And I feel like the economics needs to be put in place. And that's what I think policy can help with a lot with that. These producer paid recycling models help a lot with that. Just kind of growing consumer awareness around sustainability helps a lot with that. But ultimately, technology for operational technology is going to put all of that in place.
00:15:07
Speaker
So, well, you've mentioned the challenges with companies and individuals. So how can companies and, well, someone like me play a role in improving recycling beyond just putting the things in the right bins?
Consumer Influence on Recycling
00:15:19
Speaker
As a consumer, I think the easiest thing you can do is change your own habits, but in terms of recycling. But you can also sort of make a change through your buying habits and through your
00:15:36
Speaker
voice in the political system. Asking your local governments to put in better recycling policies, increasing the recycling rates, making producers responsible for the packaging that's being put into the waste stream. These are all things that you could do as a consumer on top of buying
00:16:01
Speaker
products that are more recycled and putting them in the bin. I think these changes are already taking place. If you look at Europe, most of Europe is already in a producer-funded model where packaging manufacturers and brands are responsible for recycling. Canada is going through this transition as we speak.
00:16:23
Speaker
In the U.S., four states have passed these producer responsibility laws, and a whole lot of other states are looking at ways to put those policies in place. So some of this is already in place, and I think as consumers, we can be aware of what's happening and sort of demand some of these changes as well.
Economic Justifications for Sustainability Technology
00:16:42
Speaker
Considering the TU, what would you work for? An innovative clean tech company.
00:16:47
Speaker
What advice would you give around fundraising scaling or partnership to someone who wants to grow their startup within the community? I think one thing that we've realized is that we should solve a problem that provides real economic benefits to our customers and today with or without policy and with or without sort of
00:17:11
Speaker
you know, this goodwill around sustainability. I think we need to solve operational issues. We need to solve pinpoints that translate into, you know, more revenue, lower costs, so that there's sort of a justification, an economic justification to your products, which, which is, which is,
00:17:28
Speaker
I think paramount and then anything else around policy changes, anything around sort of, you know, sort of more awareness and sort of more demand towards sustainability that will just be sort of, you know, wind tailwinds to your, to your business that will just drive your business.
00:17:43
Speaker
faster, but I think you need to have the basic economics for your products figured out even without looking five years ahead. You need to be solving problems today. I think if you can do that and you're solving a climate problem, I think you're in a very good shape.
00:18:00
Speaker
And do you feel like they can join some communities, online communities, offline communities, invest in some partnerships, research some slide group groups, discord channels or anything similar? Because those are the answers that I usually get from people who are my guests here and they find those places to be quite informative and good for making connections.
00:18:19
Speaker
I think, unfortunately, in recycling, technology companies have not played in this space historically. There isn't a ready place where you can go to join a community for thinking technology advocates. There's a lot of forums and
00:18:37
Speaker
And there's a lot of trade groups and there's a lot of sort of traditional sort of conferences and events that are focused on recycling. But a lot of these things that you mentioned, which is sort of the next generation of community, doesn't exist prolifically in the recycling space. But if your listeners are interested, we're happy to join and foster a community.
00:19:00
Speaker
How can people reach out to you? Yeah, it's really easy. Our website is everslabs.ai. And on the top right button, the top right part of the webpage, there is a subscribe button. So if you're interested in the company, you can do that. If you're interested in reaching out to me personally, you can get on LinkedIn and add me. It's really easy. And yeah, we've got a great LinkedIn channel as well for our company. So we post a lot of very informative
00:19:26
Speaker
information there around sort of what's happening in the industry, you know, what we're doing with, with specific clients of ours, how we're solving their problems, you know, any advancements we're making in technology, you can find them there. So yeah, please do reach out. We will link.
00:19:41
Speaker
all your handles in the description of this episode so that people can easily click and go to your online space quickly and effortlessly. And my last question for you is, what emerging technologies or trends are you most excited about?
Innovations in Chemical Recycling
00:19:58
Speaker
Of course, in relation to sustainability, not in general. That's a good question. I mean, there's a lot of different AI being applied to this technology, which obviously ours is one of them.
00:20:10
Speaker
that I'm excited about. But there's just other things that are not AI related, I think, that is critical to packaging waste that I'm excited about. So when I first joined Everslabs, I didn't know much about the recycling process. And so the question I always had was, if I help recycle or recover a plastic bottle, will that plastic bottle be able to be used again
00:20:39
Speaker
in the supply chain. So the typical way that when somebody recycles a plastic bottle is they melt the plastic and turn it back into pellets. When you melt the plastic, integrate the quality so you can't use it for the same purpose that you would use this. So if you recycle a plastic bottle, like a water bottle, you can't use it to make plastic water bottle again, because the quality is not there. You have to use it to make some other plastic. And you can do this for three or four cycles before that plastic becomes
00:21:09
Speaker
unusable for packaging. Well, you know, I think there's a lot of real innovation going on in chemical processing now, paralysis, gasification, which takes those plastics and either turns them back into, you know, virgin, almost virgin like material, so brand new plastic.
00:21:25
Speaker
or turns them into fuel for creating energy. So these are sort of paralysis, gasification processes, which are getting more and more efficient. They're costly to implement, but that's just an economy of scale thing, right? And I think those sorts of technologies give me a lot of, I guess, status or just comfort that the job that we're doing in being able to recover more, there's somebody else on the other line being able to turn that back into real products, which I'm excited about.
00:21:52
Speaker
Well, thank you. That sounds promising. I have to say, I read an article recently that there's a scientist in Japan who actually is doing that. He, well, discovered some sort of a chemical process to recycle plastic bags and bottles directly into crude oil. Plastics come from, you know, it's a hydrocarbon that comes from the, you know, the petroleum family, right? So it makes sense that you can turn that back into energy.
00:22:18
Speaker
Well, this is the end of our conversation. So thank you once again for being a part of our podcast, and I hope we gave enough information to our audiences about how recycling works and what Ehrlich lab does. Thank you, Dunia. I enjoyed talking to you.
Sponsor Acknowledgement and Closing
00:22:40
Speaker
Well, thank you for tuning into the Green New Perspective podcast. This episode is proudly sponsored by New Perspective, a Boston-based marketing agency working with clean tech clients only. If you want to know more about our sponsor, there are links in the description of this video. And if you want to stay updated on the latest innovations in clean tech and sustainability, consider subscribing to our channel.
00:23:03
Speaker
and hit that notification bell so you never miss an episode. That's all from me this time. Thank you for joining me and hopefully I'll catch you in the next one. Bye!