Humans produce a lot of trash. How much trash you ask? We produce 2.3 billion tons of trash per year. That’s enough to fill about 800,000 Olympic pools every year. So, what do we do with it all and how does it get managed? Some of it, depending on your municipality, can be composted, some of it gets recycled, but despite our best intentions, most of it ends up in our landfills. In an ideal world, the majority of our trash would be reused and recycled, but recycling, despite its promises, is actually a regressing industry. Counterintuitively, over the last 15 years, recycling rates in the United States have stagnated and even decreased.
Recycling isn’t stagnating because people don’t want to recycle. In fact, people want to recycle so badly, waste management streams suffer from “wishcycling”, a phenomenon whereby people try to recycle items that not only aren’t recyclable, but actually end up contaminating and ruining potential batches of recyclables.
At the heart of it, recycling and waste management systems as they exist today face a major incentive problem. Because recycled material is sold in a commodity market, prices for recycled materials like aluminum, paper, plastic, and glass fluctuate a lot. An unreliable market disincentivizes the waste management industry from investing in more efficient sorting systems that could increase overall recycling.
While it might not seem obvious, recycling has an important role to play in global decarbonization. When materials like aluminum and plastic get recycled, the extraction of new raw materials to replace them is averted, as are the emissions that would have gone into their production. For example, for every ton of aluminum that gets reused, the carbon that would’ve been emitted into the atmosphere to produce more aluminum from new raw materials is never emitted.
As it stands, society is not capturing the decarbonization potential of recycling. Too much waste is wasted because of human error, a lack of incentives, and waste management systems with inefficient infrastructure. What if AI could revolutionize the way we manage our trash? Instead of exposing human lives to toxic chemicals and other dangers that inevitably find themselves in trash, what if there were technological interventions that could automate sorting, have an outsized climate impact, and make waste assets more valuable all at the same time? Our guest this month, Matanya Horowitz, CEO and founder of AMP, believes all of this is possible.
*note: In the episode, Emily incorrectly says that AMP has recycled 20 million metric tons of material. The actual number is 2.5 million tons.
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