Matanya Horowitz is not above dumpster diving in the name of innovation. His company, AMP Robotics, has developed robots to help waste management facilities better sort through incoming trash and separate recyclables. AMP has tested and refined their technology since launching in 2014, in part with materials that Matanya and his team personally picked from the garbage. Today, their robots can be found in hundreds of facilities worldwide, including some of their own.

This week on How I Built This Lab, Matanya talks about the business of recycling and his company’s work to increase global recycling rates. Plus, Matanya explains how investors have come to see the value in garbage and dives into the reasons why so much recyclable material ends up in landfills.




This episode was produced by Sam Paulson and edited by John Isabella, with music by Ramtin Arablouei. Our audio engineer was Katherine Silva.

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Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab.

Right before the pandemic, I joined my son on a school field trip to a recycling center in the Bay Area here in California.

And I was really surprised to see how it works.

There was a giant conveyor belt of glass and plastic and paper all mixed up in a row of people sorting it as fast as they could.

And while the workers were amazing and fast, there was a ton of stuff that was inevitably left behind and not recycled.

In the US, the EPA estimates that only a third of all waste actually gets recycled.

Well, most recycling facilities just aren't equipped to sort through all the materials they receive.

My guest today, Matanya Horowitz, launched Amp Robotics in 2014 to tackle this very problem.

The company uses artificial intelligence and robots to sort through waste more efficiently, which means recycling facilities across the world are able to actually recycle more of the material they receive.

Matanya studied robotics at Caltech and it was there where he discovered deep learning.

It's a method in artificial intelligence that enables computers to process data like the human brain.

You could just start to see that machines were going to be able to see as well as a person for the first time in a very kind of fundamental and true way.

And so even though that wasn't my focus area, I was like, Oh my gosh, this is going to be massive.

And after graduating, I was looking for areas where I thought it could be useful because I was like, this might be the next mobile phone sort of wave.

I don't know, but I just know it's going to be a big deal.

So you're seeing the beginnings of what will and is already starting to revolutionize industry in the US and even consumer products.

And with obviously a lot of experience working in robotics, so you start to explore, hey, what could I do?

Where can I actually make a contribution?

And of course, we know you end up in the sector of recycling, but how did you come to that?

So, I wish I had a story that was about me really being an expert in recycling or maybe I saw a plastic bag blow across the road and it made me sad or something.

I said to myself, okay, you have a machine that could see roughly as well as a person.

There were different things in drones I was pretty interested in.

I had an idea for a drone you'd kind of throw in the air and it would follow you and create kind of like a highlights reel.

You could throw it in the air while you're snowboarding.

Yeah, you know, I think somebody actually went ahead and did that and I saw that you'd have to raise a lot of money for drones.

It seemed like it was getting very crowded.

I started researching a couple different industries, but I visited a recycling facility in Los Angeles.

And if you've ever visited a recycling facility, you'll see that the main task is people standing around conveyor belts sorting through material by hand.

You have people picking bottles, cans, cardboard, paper.

It doesn't smell great, and the turnover's very high.

People don't kind of put their full heart into the job and so the material quality is lower than it needs to be.

And it was really clear that this is an industry where robotics could really have an impact.

I would talk to the recycling facility owners and managers and they would say, this industry absolutely needs robots.

I don't understand why we can't get robots.

And with a vision system and technology, they could see roughly as well as a person.

Now you could bring that tool to this problem.

You know, I want to just step back and talk to you about recycling.

Only about 60% of American households have access to like curbside recycling programs.

You know, for most of us, we just dump it all into 1 bin, you know, all recyclables, or maybe you sort paper and then and then everything else, cans, glass bottles.

I've been to 1, I went to 1 in Berkeley, California a couple years ago, and was amazed because it is a conveyor belt.

And there are humans just sorting things out on the conveyor belt as it passes by.

And a lot of things just naturally don't get sorted or, you know, like a bottle gets tossed in with aluminum.

And These facilities are just super inefficient.

And I was kind of surprised learning that only about 35% of waste is recycled in the US, even though much more of it is recyclable.

Well, there's a couple kind of core challenges to the industry that you're hitting on.

You know, 1 of the main 1 that we're making a big impact with is, is technical.

All this material you put in the recycling bin, it gets smashed, it gets folded, it's dirty, it's torn in different ways.

And so you have this huge stream of material that is inconsistent.

And that inconsistency makes it very hard to separate.

The core task of the industry is to separate out these different commodities.

You want to get all the number 1 plastics in 1 spot, the number 2 plastics.

But if they're smashed up, if they're folded, they're kind of mushed together.

And that core technical problem is what's made the industry so reliant on people.

The second problem is really a problem of incentives.

If you can separate material out, is it going to be worth separating out?

And because of the need for all of this manual labor, what you find is for a lot of materials, it may not be profitable to actually recycle them, which is unfortunate Because what you find is the vast majority of materials can be reused or recycled in some way.

But for many of them, you know, the 2 thirds of material that isn't getting recycled today, that incentive isn't very strong.

In other words, it's not strong Because the cost, particularly the labor cost of recycling all this stuff is sometimes higher than the price you get for selling recycled materials, right?

Yeah, well, and to give you a couple of figures that I think are helpful, most of these materials, they live in a commodity market.

So, you know, oil goes up and down, plastic goes up and down.

So sometimes, you know, just by virtue of what the economy is doing, recycling becomes a better or worse business.

You know, setting aside any technology like, like what we have, But some rough figures here are that the recyclables you put in your recycling bin, depending on that commodity market, are probably worth about $100 per ton.

You can pull out that plastic and sell it.

The trouble is that the cost of running it through a recycling facility ends up being about $100 a ton.

It depends on how modern the facility is and these things, but you're kind of at this point where it's a little bit marginal.

But what you can see is if with technology you can bring that cost of sorting down to

And also if you make it worthwhile to sort more materials, that $100 a ton of value can become more like 120 or 140, either by purifying the material or being more specific about what you separate out.

And now recycling starts to become this phenomenal business.

Now you've sort of incentivized more recycling.

So a significant amount of material is recycled, but it's only about a third.

And Plastic in particular, I think is problematic because not only, as you mentioned, not only its price go up and down depending on the price of oil, sometimes it's just cheaper to make virgin plastic than it is to recycle it.

But plastic also degrades after several uses, like recycled plastic over time becomes toxic essentially.

Well, yeah, there's a whole bunch of different kind of issues around plastic.

You know, the 1 that I'm most focused on personally is plastics in the ocean and how do you really keep all these plastics from getting there.

But all of these challenges around plastic, the real hard part about it is it's kind of matched with plastics being this wonderful material.

Like it's so strong, it's so lightweight, it can keep our food safe.

And so, you know, as I see it, the most important thing that we can do is we make it so that the world tries to capture that plastic and get value out of it so that we can make sure it's properly handled and doesn't make it into our environment and into our, you know, food or, you know, whatever.

And what I get most excited about over the long term is if you make recycling this fundamentally better business, you not only create an incentive to expand recycling in the US or in Europe, but if you can make it so that there's a stronger incentive to recycle in the developing world, now you really make a huge impact because it ends up a lot of these plastics in the ocean are kind of coming from developing nations where they don't have strong waste infrastructure.

That's the debt we ultimately want to make.

We're going to take a short break, but when we come back, Matanya explains how he got AMP robotics off the ground and why that involved some dumpster diving.

I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

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I'm Guy Raz, and my guest today is Matanja Horowitz, founder and CEO of Amp Robotics.

All right, so you are searching around for how you can be part of this new emerging technology, AI, combined with robotics, and you land on recycling.

You realize that part of the problem is just the human problem, just sorting this stuff accurately.

And so you decide to tackle this problem and see if you could launch a company that could essentially automate this.

So tell me about the idea that you decided to come up with.

Well, I was focused on where is a spot where this artificial intelligence technology was the core linchpin to building a new product.

So I started focusing on recycling and I liked it because it seemed like you could use robots that had already been around for decades if you could pair them with this vision system.

You should have 1 hard technical problem.

You didn't want to have to innovate on the robotic side, at least not too much.

So I started kind of zeroing in on this idea of building a robot that could be bolted onto a conveyor belt and just pick stuff.

That's really all we're trying to do is pick a bottle and pick a can.

I applied for a grant from the National Science Foundation.

There's a program called the SBIR, Small Business Innovations Research Program.

That gave me some seed funding to get started and started building a little prototype.

There was a lot of good fortune on the way.

Initially, I couldn't afford a conveyor belt and got a grant from Oscar Blues, the brewing company.

I was applying for these grants, I was visiting recycling facilities, I didn't know the industry that well.

And so I was honestly saying a lot of dumb stuff, asking a lot of dumb questions.

And you know, I'm kind of amazed looking back that people would give me the time of day.

But but yeah, started kind of building this robot, the first data sets for the vision system.

So you sort of need examples of bottles and cans to train this artificial intelligence stuff.

Yeah, I did dumpster diving for him was going to recycling centers and pulling out bottles and cans.

And yeah, just started hacking away at it.

I mean, this is a hardware and a software challenge, right?

Because you've got to build the hardware to be physically resilient, right?

Because there's a lot of just grossness that it's going to deal with.

And, you know, there's probably going to be rotten milk or rotten.

And then there's the software side, which is it's got to identify the different plastics.

What's glass, what's paper, what's, right?

Tell me how you started to work on building a machine that could identify what it's picking up and sorting out.

So the interesting thing was the computer vision technology, this artificial intelligence, actually started to work really well almost from the beginning.

You know, we had some insights really early on as to what would be important to these algorithms and had a lot of success.

Initially, we weren't at 99% accuracy, but 1 of the nice things about recycling is honestly the bar is a little low.

Like, it's hard to consistently create pure material.

And so, as compared to automotive, where you can't run over 1 out of a hundred people you see, you know, for us, if you mess up on 1 bottle or can, you're still doing a lot better than the status quo.

And we were able to kind of meet the standards of the industry pretty quickly.

The part we thought would be easy, which was using these off-the-shelf robots, that ended up being really tough.

So rotten milk sounds gross, but the real problem with it is that as it dries out, it starts to get really sticky.

And these robots had like claws, like you'd see in an arcade with a claw machine, or how are they picking up the recycled material?

So you know, we actually did start with claws, and that was basically what my PhD was on, was having robots use claws in interesting ways.

It's just really hard to imitate what people do.

There's so many sophisticated things you do, like when you're picking up something that's flat like a flattened carton, If you kind of do it slowly, you'll see you do things like you push down

And then that lets you wrap your fingers around.

It's very hard to get a robot to do this kind of sophisticated multi-step planning.

And what I saw was it was going to be tough.

And we ended up switching to a whole different technology that I didn't even know much about in graduate school, which was using vacuum technology.

So basically using something that's an industrialized system, but it's not that different from your vacuum cleaner at home.

You think about, okay, I can take my vacuum cleaner and I can kind of point it at an aluminum can, I'll probably be able to pick up the aluminum can.

That's kind of what we started to do, just point a vacuum at the thing you want and pick it up.

And we found we could get that to work really well.

So we kind of hit the easy button on this.

I've spent like 9 years of my life thinking about vacuums.

There's like a few tubes over the conveyor belt and They'll just pop down and suck up each piece of trash.

And it happens really fast, like in a millisecond.

But how did you make it so it wouldn't just suck up like 4 things, right?

Instead of just the actual thing it needs to suck up.

You end up having this trade-off exactly like you're describing, it can't be too big or it'll pick up too much, it can't be too small.

We rely a lot on our vision system to look at the items even if they're overlapping and only target promising areas to pick things up.

The thing self-cleans, it reverses the airflow after every pick to clean itself out in case it picked up some plastic bags or something.

We're constantly trying to make it better.

The hardest part out of all of it ended up being keeping it from getting gunked up with that rotten milk, pieces of glass debris.

There's so much stuff that can just kind of accumulate in a recycling facility.

And what we found was even once we made something that worked, most concepts for doing this will get gunked up with stuff within half an hour and we needed something that would last days.

And that ended up being the hardest piece of it.

I mean, how much so for example, in a traditional recycling center where it's sorted by humans, I have to imagine that oftentimes, you know, some glass gets into the aluminum cans, you know, and some paper gets into the plastic.

How much more accurate are these machines and humans?

So 1 is a person can actually be very good and produce above 99% purity, but they almost never do.

Just because the staff tends to not be motivated and it's a tough job and you start zoning out and things.

And so what you'll see is for most commodities, the recycling facilities will produce material that kind of bumps around 90 or 95 percent pure.

And so our facilities, the biggest thing is, besides being fully automated and having this lower cost structure as a result, is they're just extremely consistent, like constantly producing material of the same purity.

Interestingly, what you find is, you know, there's this broader supply chain.

We're selling the plastics to somebody and they take these plastics and because the industry can't get to a high enough purity consistently, those buyers will actually have a whole sorting process where they sort it again.

They're cleaning up what they just bought.

We sell those guys robots, so our robots are helping clean the stuff up.

And so the result though is We can calibrate the purity to what the buyer will pay.

So if they pay a premium, we can hit a very high standard.

If they're looking for something that's middle of the road, more like 95%, we'll just produce at

In the United States, who handles recycling?

Because I think a lot of people assume it's like the government or municipal offices, but it's mostly not right.

Yeah, it'll be companies like waste management or Republic services.

You'll find some small family businesses.

We have 1 customer that's recycling and disposal services in Virginia.

But the way the industry works is your city will have or your HOA will have a waste contract, and they'll have a contract with 1 of these groups.

Some municipalities decide to do it themselves, but for the most part it's a company, and they'll take your trash and they'll take your recycling, they'll bring the trash to a landfill or sometimes an incineration facility, they'll take the recycling and sort it out and run that business.

And yeah, the municipalities typically aren't doing all of it themselves, but in some cases they do.

So when you started to, I mean, when you began this journey and you started to raise money for it, presumably you had to sort of say, hey, this is a big market opportunity, right?

Because, look, let's be honest, nobody is, I mean, as much as they say they are, is investing just out of the goodness of their hearts.

If presumably most of the customers here are companies that are already recycling.

And if recycling isn't a big driver of revenue, right, for some of these big companies like waste management, which makes its money from collecting garbage, how do you make the case that this is actually going to be, it's going to make money for them?

So fundraising was very hard for most of the life of the company for exactly this reason.

We started with these sorting robots and we kind of described this 1 that uses a suction cup.

And really that's actually not so much about the recycling business.

It's really about kind of labor and automation.

And so you look at the market and you say, okay, there's tens of thousands of people doing this manual sorting task.

There's a potential for tens of thousands of robots.

And you do the math on that and you find that that market's worth a couple billion dollars.

And that can be exciting for a certain class of investor, but when they look at it, they'll say, okay, there's municipal contracts in this industry.

There's a high degree of concentration into the biggest waste players.

That makes it really hard to sell lots of units.

And so what we found was this kind of story around automation didn't really attract a whole lot of investors.

And we ended up getting the self-selecting group of investors who believed in kind of a bigger picture, which was, why is it that the world is throwing away all of this good stuff?

Okay, it's because sorting it costs too much.

Okay, if you can solve that, what does that mean?

And if you do some math, what you find is that between the plastics, the metals, the paper, and everything, the world is throwing away hundreds of billions of dollars worth of value.

That's not counting some of the fundamental costs of disposal, like moving it to a landfill and throwing it away and the cost of doing all of that.

And so if you can make a dent in the fundamental economics of recycling and make it a better business, you're unlocking hundreds of billions of dollars of value.

And so what you see for us is we started with this robot, and that was kind of the first kind of beachhead.

We've sold hundreds of those robots now, and it's a very strong business.

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When robots recycle with Matanya Horowitz of AMP Robotics