AMP Robotics hits AI-driven recycling milestone

AMP Robotics recently hit the milestone of processing one billion recyclables over a 12-month period ending March 31, 2020. The company also named longtime industry executive Marcel Vallen as its vice president of international sales, while it continues to expand its operations and forthcoming new innovations to help recycling facilities further improve productivity through automation.

"AMP had a strong first quarter of 2020. Revenue is up more than 50%, and our project pipeline continues to grow rapidly due to market adoption of our technology and the value it creates for our customers,” says Matanya Horowitz, AMP founder and chief executive officer. “We also marked a very important company milestone: identifying, sorting and picking our one billionth piece of material over the last 12 months. This achievement demonstrates the productivity, precision and reliability of our AI application for the recycling industry. It also represents a meaningful environmental metric in the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by approximately half a million metric tons.”

AMP hit the one billion milestone using the company's Neuron AI platform. The platform uses machine learning and computer vision to recognize different colors, textures, shapes, sizes, patterns, and even brand labels to identify exactly what the material is and whether it is recyclable. The technology then guides robots to consistently perform sorting tasks more than twice as quickly as humans, with much greater accuracy, and over long durations of time.

This technology recovers plastics, cardboard, paper, metals, cartons, cups and many other recyclables that can be reclaimed for raw material processing. Plus, it can swiftly pivot to handle sudden shifts in material volumes, happening now as a result of the pandemic, to recover high-demand materials, like paper, tissue, cardboard, and other packaging. This capability is especially critical as demand and prices for commodities fluctuate, given the role recyclables play in feeding the domestic supply chain for manufacturing.

Keeping facilities operational with automation

Recycling has been classified as an essential industry and service by the Department of Homeland Security during the COVID-19 pandemic. The demand for AMP’s AI and robotics technology has accelerated as recycling businesses turn to automation to remove their employees from harm’s way, navigate chronic labor shortages to remain operational and adapt to spikes in residential volume and material types caused by sudden shifts in consumer buying patterns.

“The pandemic has hit the recycling industry hard, with many facilities struggling to maintain operations and productivity levels amid worker safety concerns, social distancing requirements, and skyrocketing residential volumes,” says Joe Benedetto, president of Virginia-based RDS. “Fortunately, we had already deployed AMP’s robotic systems, which are helping us weather this crisis. We’re fully operational and can handle the heavier volumes of recyclables driven by shelter-in-place orders and rapidly changing consumer behavior. We’re meeting the increased demand for paper and cardboard while protecting our employees and controlling costs.”

Recycling veteran Vallen joins AMP

AMP also named longtime industry executive Marcel Vallen as its vice president of international sales. In this role, he is responsible for sales and business development efforts in new geographies, establishing and executing a global sales strategy aligning with the company’s growth objectives.

“Welcoming Marcel to the team is key to our strategic growth plans, including in Europe and other international markets,” says Horowitz. “Marcel has a deep understanding of the challenges faced by the recycling industry both domestically and abroad, as well as the opportunities and value created by innovative and technology-driven solutions like ours.”

Vallen brings more than 35 years of recycling and waste management industry experience to AMP. His background spans the design and build of materials recovery facilities (MRFs) to systems commercialization and general management of facilities around the world. Most recently, he served as president and CEO of Komptech Americas and Plexus Recycling Technologies.

Facility expansion sets stage for continued growth, innovation

As part of the company’s growth, AMP has added another manufacturing facility in Colorado dedicated to the increased production of its robotic systems. Furthermore, AMP doubled the size of its engineering innovation lab for the development of new AI and robotic applications for the recycling industry. The company is planning the release of a series of new products and performance features in the coming months to help further automate MRFs and make recycling even more efficient and cost-effective.

AMP was on a growth trajectory and scaling its business prior to the pandemic, having raised $16 million in Series A funding in November 2019, led by Sequoia Capital with participation from Closed Loop Partners, Congruent Ventures and Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners, backed by Alphabet Inc. 

About AMP Robotics

AMP is applying AI and robotics to help modernize recycling with a number of robotics systems and AI platforms. With deployments across the United States, Canadaand Japan, AMP’s technology has applications to municipal waste, e-waste, and the recovery of construction and demolition materials.