Recycling is fundamental to living in a sustainable world. By prolonging the lifecycle of resources already in circulation, industry demand can be satisfied while simultaneously avoiding the depletion of natural resources that is made ‘necessary’ by poor resource management. Recycling and effective resource management has a host of benefits, from offsetting the effects of climate change, protecting biodiversity, to ensuring the earth is preserved for future generations.

COP26 has brought about new commitments and action plans for governments to battle climate change moving forward. There has never been a better time to discuss the ways in which we can increase sustainability and mitigate climate change collectively. One issue is recycling, which is not only a challenge of changing individual behaviours, but also involves inspiring and motivating industries to adopt more environmentally sustainable practices.

Businesses can do great things with recycled materials:

Recycling does not mean using substandard materials or sacrificing quality, and there are fantastic examples of what can be achieved when companies source recycled materials over their new raw counterparts. One great example is clothing line Paratonia, which paired with Net Plus to make raw clothing materials out of 100% recycled fishing nets. By using recycled fishing netting for hat brims alone, 149 metric tonnes of fishing nets have been recycled, removing masses of waste plastic from the world’s oceans. Children’s toy company Green toys create toys from 100% recycled materials such as milk jugs, keeping 55 million from entering landfill.

Why don’t more businesses do this?

Despite these great examples, many businesses still opt to source new rather than recycled materials. Several challenges arise within the recycling process, incentivising businesses to opt for new sources that are cheaper, more reliable, or just generally more convenient. This preference results in new materials being created, depleting natural resources, and having reusable materials go to landfill.

Fortunately, Artificial Intelligence (AI) may offer a solution. By adopting AI into the recycling process, the cost, availability, and reliability of sourcing recycled materials could be greatly improved: making these sources more desirable to industry and ensuring that they adopt more sustainable practices. Here are some of the biggest challenges with recycling, and the ways that AI could act as a solution:

Recycling is difficult to sort and separate

One of the biggest challenges in recycling is being able to sort materials consistently and accurately into different categories. When we recycle at home, we sort according to glass, paper, plastic, cardboard, tin etc: but this is not the case when it arrives at the treatment plant. Each of these categories have a far greater range of sub-categories which they must be divided into. This is far too complicated to do within our homes – but it needs to be done so waste can be recycled. For plastic alone, there are multiple types within our standard waste, all which require a different method of treatment to recycle!

This process of sorting often requires a large manual workforce to manually categorise and separate types of waste for recycling. This is manual, difficult, and costly, and if done incorrectly then entire batches of recycled materials can be contaminated, rendering them useless. This means a lot of recycled materials needlessly end up in landfill sites. A