Indonesian waste sorting | Plastic recycling

Time:2022-02-12

Since Shanghai began to implement the “most stringent waste sorting measures in history” in Shanghai in July, waste sorting has become a “compulsory course” for many people in their daily lives. Over the past month, the use of new technologies and new models to promote waste sorting has emerged. plastic recycling machine

The problem of garbage pollution is not unique to China, and many developing countries are suffering. A few days ago, Google revealed in a blog that in order to reduce plastic waste in Indonesia, a startup in Indonesia used Google’s artificial intelligence technology.

According to reports, plastic waste is a big problem facing Indonesia. The country has a coastline of 50,000 kilometers, and there is a general lack of public awareness of garbage disposal, dumping a lot of garbage into the sea.

Indonesian startup Gringgo hopes to use technology to deal with this problem.

Gringgo CTO and co-founder Febrialdi Platama introduced that it is very difficult to price recyclables due to the influence of Indonesia’s topography. Indonesia has 17,000 islands, including 5 major islands, and most of the recycling facilities are located in Java. This increases the cost of transporting recyclables from other islands, so materials with lower recovery values ​​are no longer classified and ultimately at the expense of environmental pollution.

Moreover, in Indonesia, sanitation workers’ routes and work arrangements are often irregular, and they lack the knowledge and expertise to pinpoint which items have a recycling value. These factors have a significant negative impact on the rate of garbage recycling in Indonesia and the livelihoods of sanitation workers.

In 2017, Gringgo released several software related to garbage disposal. One of the software allows sanitation workers to track the type and quantity of recyclables, and to recommend more planned routes to save time, enabling manual quantification of recycled items and potential revenue. Platama introduced, releasing the software within a year, Gringgo increased the garbage collection rate by 35% in Indonesia’s first pilot village.

Earlier this year, Gringgo was named one of the 20 recipients of the Google AI Impact Challenge. “We thought we could create an image recognition tool that would classify different wastes and judge their value, which in turn would help increase plastic waste recycling rates,” Platama said.

With the help of Google, Gringgo is working with another startup to develop image recognition tools using Google’s machine learning platform TensorFlow. The goal is to allow sanitation workers to better analyze and classify waste and quantify their value.

With the blessing of artificial intelligence, sanitation workers will be able to take pictures of the garbage and judge the related items and their value through image recognition. “This will educate sanitation workers about the market value of different recyclates, help them optimize their choices, and maximize their income. It will ultimately encourage sanitation workers to recycle and dispose of waste with greater efficiency and improve recycling.” Ma said.

According to Platma, Gringgo’s goal is to continually optimize the artificial intelligence model to make it more economical and to be widely used.

“We believe that artificial intelligence can help solve the most difficult social and environmental problems of our time – such as health care, disaster prediction, environmental protection, agriculture or cultural protection,” said Jeff Dean, senior researcher and head of Google AI. Google has launched the “Using AI for Social Benefits” project to explore the use of machine learning related research to have a positive impact on social, humanitarian and environmental issues.

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