Here’s how a robot is helping sort through recycling for customers in Lancaster, York and beyond

• By Rachel Curry / For LNP | LancasterOnline

Robotic technology is helping sort through recycling from Lancaster and other central Pennsylvania businesses and residents.

At the Penn Waste Materials Recovery Facility in York, a new robot has become part of the sorting floor, increasing the purity and efficiency of recycling for hundreds of thousands of residential and commercial customers from York, Lancaster and beyond.

Waste management and recycling company Penn Waste partnered with Cox Enterprises, the parent company of the world’s largest auto auction Manheim Auto Auction, to install an AI-enabled recycling sorting robot from the San Francisco-based Glacier. The York facility receives recycling from the Manheim business, and Cox’s zero-waste initiative involves investing in the broader communities where they operate their automotive and other businesses. Cox did not disclose how much it invested in the Glacier project at Penn Waste.

How it works

At Penn Waste, Glacier’s technology is put to use on the paper sorting line. As materials go down a conveyor belt, a camera identifies each item (it’s capable of deciphering more than 70 materials, from cardboard to newspaper to aluminum cans), removing what doesn’t belong on the paper line and placing it in bins where the materials can be correctly recycled.

Underneath a blue rectangular prism, two arms equipped with vacuum suction technology pick up items at a rate of 45 picks per minute. The AI technology relies on a dataset that includes billions of images, helping the computer vision communicate with the robotic arms about what to do next. Meanwhile, a human worker oversees the robot at all times, using a laptop to analyze imaging coming in from the computer vision technology.

Rebecca Hu-Thrams, CEO and co-founder of Glacier, says the company’s goal is “improving the purity rate of the materials, getting more recyclables to their proper homes and overall making recycling safer, smarter and more sustainable.”

This technological advancement is a part of a larger facility upgrade that started after a devastating fire took place at Penn Waste’s materials recovery facility in 2022. The fire, likely started from a lithium-ion battery (which, along with inappropriately disposed propane tanks, are a daily job hazard) led to the installment of cutting-edge fire detection and mitigation strategies throughout the facility. While there are still human sorters on the floor, many of the 32 employees on site have been upskilled to remotely operate technology such as the Glacier recycling robot. (A handful of employees elected to take on jobs at the hauling site just over a mile from the materials recovery facility after the fire, but there were no layoffs and most employees stayed in their roles or were promoted.)

Benefits

In the world of material recovery facilities, Penn Waste is considered state-of-the-art. For a facility already equipped with modern technology, the return on investment for a Glacier recycling robot is under a year. Other material recovery facilities with more catching up to do on the technological front may see a return on their investment in two years or less.

“MRF operators today have to contend with things like figuring out how to get more value out of the recycling stream while the contamination rate coming in the door is getting dirtier every year,” says Hu-Thrams. “They have to figure out how to keep their costs low, their purity rates high, while also keeping their workers safe in one of the most dynamic and volatile industrial manufacturing environments on this planet.”

By getting larger, purer bales of fibrous and non-fibrous recycling that they can sell to end markets for repurposing into products like apparel, bicycles, newspapers, cans and bottles (just to name a few things recycled materials become), Penn Waste is able to improve its bottom line and make recycling a more profitable business—though the official figures are yet to be determined as Penn Waste’s use of the Glacier robot is still in its early days. And as packaging materials evolve, Glacier can adapt its AI models to sort new kinds of items, helping the technology avoid obscurity and future-proofing the recycling facilities they work with.

Kyle Byler, division vice president at Waste Connection (which acquired Penn Waste in 2019), says the facility processed 103,000 tons of recycling in 2024.

“Anything in this market that was recycled most likely came through Penn Waste,” says Byler. “The Glacier unit, installed in under a day, works in all kinds of conditions and gives us real-time data about what’s being recovered. The insight helps us make better operational decisions and improve the quality of the materials leaving this building.”