Sony Pixel Power calrec Sony

Trash to Cash: Recyclers Tap Startup with World's Largest Recycling Network to Freshen Up Business Prospects

14/06/2021

Matanya Horowitz smelled a problem in 2014.

Fresh out of CalTech with a Ph.D., he saw that recycling centers lacked robotics and computer vision to pick through heaps of garbage-contaminated recyclables.

Horowitz founded AMP Robotics that year to harness AI run on NVIDIA GPUs to turn sorting out the trash into cash.

It's a ripe opportunity. People worldwide produce 2 billion tons of waste a year, with 37 percent going to landfill, according to the World Bank.

Sorting by hand on conveyor belts is dirty and dangerous, and the whole place smells like rotting food. People in the recycling industry told me that robots were absolutely needed, said Horowitz, the company's CEO.

His startup, which has 130 employees, can double sorting output and increase purity for bales of materials. It can also sort municipal waste, electronic waste, and construction and demolition materials.

Neuron's Heaping Dataset AMP has collected one of the world's largest labeled datasets of images for recyclables with its Neuron AI platform.

It's well into the millions now, said Horowitz.

That's used in training its image recognition models, run on NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs. Training with such a massive dataset from packaging types from all over the world, different lighting conditions and many unique recycling businesses has provided AMP as much as 99 percent accuracy on inference.

A National Science Foundation grant in 2015 helped Horowitz hatch a small team to jump on the problem early.

AMP, based outside Boulder, Colo., has scooped up business with more than 40 recyclers. Along the way, the company has attracted $75 million in funding as it's become the rising star of AI for recycling. It recently landed on the Forbes AI 50, a list of the top AI companies to watch.

The company is a member of NVIDIA Inception, a virtual accelerator program that helps startups in AI and data science get to market faster. Direct connections to NVIDIA and training credits provided from the Inception program helped accelerate experimentation and innovation for AMP, said Horowitz.

Dirty Recyclables Ban Recyclers can't keep up with sorting. Tighter restrictions against contamination in recycled materials sent to China have made combing through it more work, creating more landfill. Worse yet for recyclers, these new added sorting costs come amid a tight labor market.

U.S. exports of plastic scraps to China have slid nearly 90 percent, according to the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries. Recycling processors worldwide are struggling to better sort trash to produce cleaner recyclables and stay in business.

The problem now for U.S. recyclers is that the costs of sorting domestically - if labor is even available - are close to the value of the materials on the commodities markets, said Horowitz.

GPU-Driven Recyclers AMP has changed the economics for recyclers. Its image classification models are deployed on NVIDIA GPUs to enable robot arms with suction cups to zip about conveyor belts, picking out trash to help.

The computer vision system for the robot arms can recognize an ever-expanding number of items. It can swiftly sort everything from Starbucks cups, PET plastic bottles and clamshell containers, to office paper, aluminum cans, hazards and many more items. The system identifies dozens of categories simultaneously.

The company's millions of labeled images drive its highly accurate image classification models, capable of identifying thousands of recyclables in milliseconds, so its robotic arms can sweep into action. AMP Robotics relies on NVIDIA GeForce RTX or V100 GPUs, depending on the recycling center, to run this split-second inference.

AMP uses the end-to-end NVIDIA workflow to train its Neuron AI platform. The system can train on over a billion types of garbage and recyclables and run on the network in real time. NVIDIA TensorRT enables a doubling in speed-up on inference and a 50 percent reduction in latency.

Because AMP keeps a fixed amount of computing resources for latency and inference, anything the company can do to accelerate existing networks allows the company to reinvest that into larger networks that unlock more performance.

The startup now has more than 120 recycling robots deployed worldwide. Its customers span the U.S., Spain, Japan, Canada and other countries that are soon to launch.

Accelerated Business Prospects Another capability AMP Robotics provides is data collection and analytics. This way recyclers can keep track in real time of how much revenue-generating materials are being collected and how much is being sent to landfill. Previously this was nearly impossible to track, Horowitz said.

AMP Robotics NVIDIA GPU-driven systems enable customers to bring costs down as well as sort plastics into different categories to achieve better returns. For instance, it can sort out HDPE color plastics, which is more valuable, from other plastics.

Also, the neural network can learn new materials over time, offering a wider range of sorting capabilities and new opportunities for revenue.

You can separate out by color, brand or form factor, and when you start to do this, you can make the material worth a lot more, he said.

Learn more about AMP Robotics from its GTC 2021 presentation.
LINK: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/06/14/recyclers-tap-startup-worlds-...
See more stories from nvidia

Most recent headlines

05/01/2027

Worlds first 802.15.4ab-UWB chip verified by Calterah and Rohde & Schwarz to be demoed at CES 2026

Worlds first 802.15.4ab-UWB chip verified by Calterah and Rohde & Schwarz to be ...

06/09/2026

Dolby and MagentaTV Bring Fans Closer to the FIFA World Cup 2026 in Germany with Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos

June 9 2026, 23:00 (PDT) Dolby and MagentaTV Bring Fans Closer to the FIFA Worl...

04/08/2026

Dalet Announces Commercial Availability of Dalia, Bringing Media-Aware Agentic AI to Enterprise Productions

Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, t...

04/07/2026

Detective Conan: Fallen Angel of the Highway Opens in Dolby Cinemas Across Japan, Presented in Dolby Atmos and Dolby ...

April 7 2026, 19:00 (PDT) Detective Conan: Fallen Angel of the Highway Opens in...

22/06/2026

Behind the Mic: SportsCenters Lisa Cohn to Retire This June From ESPN as Longest-Tenured Anchor

Behind The Mic provides a roundup of recent news regarding on-air talent, includ...

22/06/2026

Cosm Appoints David Ho as Chief Legal Officer

Cosm has announced the appointment of David Ho as Chief Legal Officer, a newly created executive role reporting to President and CEO Jeb Terry. Ho will oversee ...

22/06/2026

Warner Bros. Discovery and AWS Announce AI-Powered Advertising Technology Platform

Warner Bros. Discovery and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have announced the developm...

22/06/2026

Daktronics Completes Audio Control System Upgrade at Petco Park for San Diego Padres

Daktronics has completed an audio control system upgrade at Petco Park in San Di...

22/06/2026

Accelerate Media Names John Willi President, Launches Accelerate Sports Network

Accelerate Media has named John Willi as President and announced the launch of the Accelerate Sports Network (ASN), a prep sports media and streaming platform c...

22/06/2026

AWSN to Air 3XBA Womens Basketball Tournament Live June 26-27

All Women's Sports Network (AWSN) and 3XBA (3 3 Basketball Association) have announced live television coverage of the annual 3XBA tournament on Friday, Jun...

22/06/2026

OWL AI Appoints Jay Prasad as Chief Executive Officer

OWL AI has announced the appointment of Jay Prasad as Chief Executive Officer and member of the Board of Directors. Prasad succeeds Josh Gwyther, who has served...

22/06/2026

CP Communications Provides RF Support for Inside the NBA at 2026 NBA Finals

CP Communications delivered RF video and audio support for TNT's Inside the NBA at the 2026 NBA Finals, providing main show coverage in San Antonio and ea...

22/06/2026

Polymarket and GRID Partner to Integrate Esports Data and Streaming into Trading Platform

Polymarket has announced a partnership with GRID, an official esports data platf...

22/06/2026

SVG New Sponsor Spotlight: Metinteractive's Rachel Mele, Ken Cyr on Building Technology Backbones for Sports Venues

As sports venues continue to evolve into more video-centric, fan-engagement-driv...

22/06/2026

SVG All-Stars: Corbin Perkins, Chief Engineer, Victory+

As the regional sports production scene shifts toward streaming, this Texan helps lead the engineering behind Victory+'s growing live platform...

22/06/2026

Meet the 2026 Sundance Institute Documentary Edit Intensive Fellows

By Kristin Feeley, Director, Documentary Film & Artist Programs the memories of your elders [are] a scaffolding for you to build your identity on - and t...

22/06/2026

Blade joins CEDAR Audio Icons line-up

New hyper-resolution analyser EQ revealed CEDAR Audio's all-new Icons plug-in series has just gained its newest member, Blade. Described by the compan...

22/06/2026

Sampleson release Aeronaut

Turn any live input into a cinematic soundscape Designed for use in the studio and on stage, Sampleson's latest creation is capable of taking any audio ...

22/06/2026

ADDAC System's new Four Strings Series

Adds guitar strings to Eurorack rigs ADDAC System are renowned for their weird and wonderful synth designs, and their line-up includes plenty of gear that&#...

22/06/2026

FIFA World Cup 2026 fever grows, as more than one third of Australians tune in to SBS coverage

FIFA World Cup 2026 fever grows, as more than one third of Australians tune in ...

22/06/2026

NAGRA Venturi - Turning Piracy Intelligence into Measurable Business Impact

In our latest blog, Tim Pearson explores NAGRA Venturi, the new streaming security solution for the AI era from NAGRAVISION. Designed to aggregate and analyze ...

22/06/2026

Xumo Expands Contextual Targeting Capabilities Through Gracenote and IRIS.TV Integrations

Expanded integrations give advertisers access to distinct contextual signals acr...

22/06/2026

Greg Garmon Joins Imagine as Senior VP, Americas Video Sales

Share Copy link Facebook X Linkedin Bluesky Email...

22/06/2026

Kaleidescape Breaks the 8K and 4:4:4 Barriers

Share Copy link Facebook X Linkedin Bluesky Email...

22/06/2026

Xilica introduces Dynamic Voice Lift in new Designer

Xilica today announced the release of Dynamic Voice Lift, a new feature in Xilica Designer v4.12 that brings adaptive speech reinforcement to large meeting spac...

22/06/2026

Official trailer released for Katie Price: Nothing to Hide, coming to Sky and NOW on 8 July

Monday 22 June 2026 Official trailer released for Katie Price: Nothing to Hide,...

22/06/2026

Eco Wave Power Turns Waves Into Watts With NVIDIA AI Infrastructure and Digital Twins

The next era of AI will not be defined by compute alone. Its growth will be dete...

22/06/2026

NVIDIA Vera CPU Opens the Way for Agentic Scientific AI at Los Alamos National Laboratory

Mission, Vision and Veritas - new Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) supercom...

22/06/2026

From Materials Simulation to Experimental Astronomy, New NVIDIA AI Software Unlocks Scientific Discoveries

At the ISC conference running in Hamburg this week, NVIDIA is introducing new so...

22/06/2026

NAIRR Science Program Reshapes Scientific Research, Powered by NVIDIA AI Infrastructure

For the past two years, the U.S. National Science Foundation's National Arti...

22/06/2026

At ISC, JUPITER Shows What Exascale Science Looks Like

JUPITER, Europe's first exascale supercomputer at Germany's Forschungszentrum J lich, runs on NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchips and NVIDIA Quantum-X800 Inf...

21/06/2026

FIFAs Oscar Sanchez on World Cup Effort: Were Feeling Good and Where We Want to Be

To call the 2026 FIFA World Cup a big undertaking would be a big understatement....

21/06/2026

John Walden's Cubase Video Tutorials

New series now live on Udemy Regular SOS contributor and Cubase workshop columnist John Walden has just released a new Cubase video course that is now avail...

21/06/2026

Hotter Than a Hot Tub: The 45C Breakthrough to Cool AI's Biggest Machines

Hot tubs sit at about 38 to 40 degrees Celsius, warm enough that most people can only soak for about 15 minutes. NVIDIA's newest AI servers can run their co...

21/06/2026

Sky announces immersive documentary series The Wargame

Sunday 21 June 2026 Sky announces immersive documentary series The Wargame The Wargame first looks ZIP (2MB) Sky today confirms the commission of The Wargam...

20/06/2026

IK Multimedia introduce ReSing Doubling

New add-on creates doubles & vocal stacks IK Multimedia's latest ReSing add-on kits the innovative software out with the ability to automatically genera...

20/06/2026

What's Next for Apogee? Start Here.

What exactly is Apogee Control V3? Control V3 is a new mixer application that controls Apogee interfaces. The new hit feature is that V3 finally allows for...

19/06/2026

NBC Sports U.S. Open Coverage Fires Up 92 Cameras, Bunker cams

Split compound eases operational challenges at Shinnecock Hills Golf Club...

19/06/2026

ESPN's Men's College World Series Production Adds Onsite Studio, POVORA CapCams, Expanded Drone Coverage for Finale in Omaha

North Carolina, Oklahoma meet in the best-of-three Finals as ESPN leans into spe...

19/06/2026

Ninja AB from The Him DSP

Company launch comprehensive mix-comparison tool The Him DSP are a plug-in company founded by The Him, an EDM DJ and producer who has amassed over half a bi...

19/06/2026

Bitwig Studio 6.1 enters beta testing

Major Sampler upgrades introduced The latest version of Bitwig's DAW software has just entered public beta testing, and is available now for all users w...

19/06/2026

Akai Pro's MPC One & MPC Key 37 get G2 upgrade

Four times the power of their predecessors Akai Pro have just introduced upgraded versions of two of their popular standalone MPC systems, kitting them out ...

19/06/2026

Eurovision secures top four position as content distributor rankings hold steady in Poland

Data from May shows seasonal outdoor trends triggers lower viewing Warsaw, Pola...

19/06/2026

Bitfocus Buttons wins another top industry award

Buttons is best control system in the rAVe Best of Infocomm Awards 2026...

19/06/2026

Mavis Studio Makes iPad Production More Powerful

Mavis Studio Makes iPad Production More Powerful Brie Clayton June 19, 2026 0 Comments InfoComm update brings new NDI Preview, PTZ control, USB audio ...

19/06/2026

Immersive Studio Metaverse Stage Tackles Post with Blackmagic Design

Immersive Studio Metaverse Stage Tackles Post with Blackmagic Design Brie Clayton June 19, 2026 0 Comments New narrative projects rely on DaVinci Reso...

19/06/2026

How to Run the Original 1993 After Effects

How to Run the Original 1993 After Effects Graham Quince June 19, 2026 0 Comments How to the original After Effects v1 in an emulator, and you don'...

19/06/2026

IBC Show to Increase Focus on Networking, Startups

Share Copy link Facebook X Linkedin Bluesky Email...

19/06/2026

Irdeto Taps Axel Gallant as CEO

Share Copy link Facebook X Linkedin Bluesky Email...

19/06/2026

SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible - Opening St...

SMPTE , the home of media professionals, technologists and engineers, has announced that its entire Standards catalog is now freely available to the global medi...