The Situation
9/10 people find recycling more confusing than investing, doing their taxes, or assembling Ikea furniture.
The confusion leads to high contamination rates, poorly executed recycling programs, and increased fees issued to municipalities. Contamination rates are as high as they have ever been. While we are not only contaminating our recycling stream, we are also failing to recycle acceptable materials. Of the 292 million tons of municipal solid waste collected in the United States in 2018, just 32% was recycled or composted. Compared to the total amount of municipal solid waste that was landfilled, 146 million tons (or 50%), we could be doing a lot better considering numerous reports indicate a large portion of landfilled waste can be diverted. This becomes a double-edged sword, we are failing to submit acceptable recycling materials, and the recycling we are submitting is flawed with high levels of contamination.
Why is this happening?
City-wide recycling education campaigns that provide the same generic message to the entire city fail to provide impactful messaging, and as a result, have a minimal impact. While we applaud the various mediums cities are using to reach their residents; postcards, social media, billboards, etc, this generic message lacks the custom education residents need to make sustained recycling behavior changes.
Additionally, waste widgets and recyclopedias are great online resources where residents can go out and search for accepted and unaccepted recycling materials, but there is a significant onus required by the citizen to self-educate. Our field data has found a breakdown of household recycling types; 80% of households are recycling correctly the majority of the time with 0 contaminants or the occasional single contaminant in their recycling cart. 15% of households are mostly recycling correctly with 2-4 contaminants in their recycling cart the majority of the time, and lastly, 5% of the population is recycling poorly by throwing 5+ contaminants in their recycling cart every collection. We find that households in the 80% category are those that are actively searching out information to make informed recycling decisions. While these resources are available to the 15% and 5% of households, they are not interested in searching out this information and these online resources go largely unused.
Custom Education
This is a situation where custom, targeted education can be largely impactful. To reach the top 15% and 5% of households, custom education needs to be sent directly to their homes to assist them in making sustained recycling behavior change.
Prairie Robotics delivers custom recycling education by providing households with an image of their recycling submission with contaminants identified. First, a basic image is taken of recycling materials in the hopper.
Second, these images are scanned using our artificial intelligence (AI) models to automatically identify contaminants.
Third, the scanned images are displayed in the Prairie Robotics platform where recycling administrators can review contaminants.
Fourth, scanned images with identified contaminants are confirmed. Following this, all other materials in the hopper are blurred out to protect citizen privacy and blur any acceptable materials. This ensures we are providing residents with just contamination feedback relevant to their household. We use a GPS to assign identified contaminants to each household to prevent from incorrectly assigning contaminants to the wrong household.
Fifth, scanned images are used as educational material and sent directly to the house that submitted them in the form of a postcard. By providing direct, custom education to the household within days of their recycling collection, households can see where they went wrong and make meaningful recycling behavior changes. Prairie Robotics is also appealing to everyone’s internal sense of competition by providing peer comparison statistics to drive engagement. Recycling performance is provided on a house-by-house or neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis to spur recycling program excitement. While these postcards are completely customizable to municipal design themes, we have a couple of postcard designs we have found to be impactful.
The results from this delivering custom education to homes in the form of postcards have been significant. After delivering custom education to households in the City of Regina for just 12 weeks, Prairie Robotics drove a 41.5% improvement in recycling.
While custom education is impactful, Prairie Robotics has also recognized the opportunity to capture recycling information and provide this information to city administrators to support data-driven policy decisions. The Prairie Robotics platform captures contamination metrics through a city-wide heat map. Contaminant types can be sorted, and City Administrators can become familiar with contaminant types, and where they are a problem within a city. This is a great tool to generate relevant, geo-fenced marketing campaigns.
Additionally, the impact of recycling education can be measured on a collection-by-collection basis to summarize the impact of various postcard designs and forms of education outreach. Because every household, neighborhood, and community is different, each will have its desired form of education that is most impactful. The Prairie Robotics platform helps municipal Administrators measure the most effective form of education through A/B testing and impact monitoring.
Prairie Robotics Automation is Giving Administration Superpowers
While an argument we often hear against automation is the possibility of automation stealing jobs from humans. This is not the case, automation is giving Administrators superpowers and relieving them of menial, mundane tasks such as manual cart audits and data collection. Automation lifts the burden of low-value tasks and offers staff the opportunity to do high-value work. By replacing menial tasks with automation, modern automation can make time for individual brilliance, allowing administrators to analyze and apply the collected data to make data-driven policy decisions. A win for City Administrators and a win for households as robust, personalization recycling programs can be constructed.
For example, in Fort St. John, a municipality in BC, Canada using the Prairie Robotics platform, bylaw officers are using the platform to review household contamination and issue enforcements. The automated identification of contaminants has empowered FSJ staff to broadly apply their existing contamination bylaws and reduce contamination in the recycling stream. The Prairie Robotics platform supports bylaw enforcements with the identified contaminants linked to the household that submitted them, this is data that has reduced household complaints of inaccurate enforcements.
Secondly, in the City of Regina, automation has helped administrators automate the entire education process. From contamination identification to sending of postcards, the City has adopted a completely hands-off approach. As a result, City staff have redirected their time to high-value work, analyzing data to measure changes to the recycling program, planning out campaigns to address problem contaminants, and driving data-supported policy decisions.
Automation Provides Consistent and Reliable Data
Manual cart audits are a great step in the right direction, but they do have their flaws. Manual auditors can only look from a top view of the recycling cart, meaning the top layer of recycling is audited, but the many materials below are left unaudited. This restricted view can leave the majority of the materials unaudited, and many contaminants unidentified. Secondly, because every human is unique, the thoroughness of inspection can vary in manual cart audits. While some auditors take several different angles, search through the contents using their hands, and audit every cart, there are cases where some manual auditors fail to uphold the same standard.
Prairie Robotics hopper cameras provide a full view of the materials from the recycling cart. Images are captured as the materials are being dumped, when they land, and when they settle to get a full view of all materials within the recycling stream. While the level of inspection can vary in manual cart audits, the automated identification of materials provides a consistent audit every time. Consistent and reliable data is crucial when delivering custom recycling education to each household and making data-driven policy decisions. The Prairie Robotics platform is 99.6% accurate in contamination identification and household association.
Summary
Recycling in North America is at a critical junction, while residents are significantly confused about recycling, contamination rates are very high, and increasing fees are issued to municipalities, significant work needs to be done to address these systemic issues. Custom, targeted recycling education is very impactful. When pairing automated recycling cart audits, and issuing custom recycling education to each household, Prairie Robotics was able to reduce contamination by 41.5% in just 12 weeks.
(all images of recycling materials within the hopper were taken from publicly available videos found on streaming services)
(all images of the Prairie Robotics platform and its features are designed using mock data and is not an representation of any private municipal data captured by the Prairie Robotics platform)
