UK waste management group Grundon (Wallingford; www.grundon.com) has started using an artificial intelligence picker to help improve its sorting and recovery of plastics waste. The company said its Fast Picker was supplied by Finland-based robotic waste separating technology specialist, ZenRobotics (Helsinki; www.zenrobotics.com), and can target and pick up to 80 items a minute with a recovered-materials purity of up to 99%.

It is currently picking up plastic bottles in different colours and polymers, including HDPE milk bottles and PET drinks bottles, and can also be trained to sort objects “both positively and negatively to remove unwanted contaminated objects such as herbicide cans, silicone cartridges and oil cans from food grade plastic”, the company added.

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In a statement Grundon said the new equipment picks at a ‘human’ rate, visually scanning the belt before deciding which items to pick. “The robot knows what a particular item is based on other items it has been trained on, in the same way a human learns to recognise similar items, and every item picked is analysed and added to its AI memory for the next time.”