Associate Member of the Chartered Institution of Wastes Management Nick Noble, DanuRobotics, explains how thinking smaller can acheive bigger results in the circular economy.
Too much domestic and commercial waste is burned or landfilled, while consumers stubbornly recycle less than 50%.
The waste industry is getting more efficient and there are successes but are we making the progress to a circular economy fast enough?
2025 is a big year for regulatory disruption so perhaps our industry should also think differently by looking outside the sector for inspiration.
What is the problem?
Most materials recovery facilities (MRFs) employ manual workers for quality control picking because humans are very capable and sophisticated machines.
We can pick a huge variety of different material from dirty mixed waste; for example, a plastic bag, then a vape, a nappy or a bit of two-by-four. If volumes are low, we can pivot to a different job, we are very adaptable.
But manual picking isn’t a viable long-term solution though because it doesn’t scale well. We’d need armies of pickers and that’s increasingly expensive with fewer people understandably willing to do the work.
Meanwhile, robotic systems across all industries have been proven for decades, showing that robots can be as capable and cost-effective as humans. Could robots increase quality control picking volumes to help meet our targets?
Could our volumes be bigger by thinking smaller?
Back in the ’90s, Jeff Bezos applied the Long Tail economic theory to the book industry. Standard business practice at the time, duplicated online, was to only stock individual books that would sell in large quantities.
Jeff Bezos cross-referenced in a graph the total number of books published by the number of each title sold. The peak of best sellers accounted for the majority of sales but then the line dropped quickly and tapered out because most titles only sell in small numbers.
He marked the sales point at which his competitors stopped selling a title and saw in this ‘Long Tail’ shape, a huge inventory of low-selling books that if he could sell them, would cumulatively give him a competitive advantage.
He needed a logistical super company of course but the early USP of Amazon focused on small quantities to get big volumes.
In our industry, MRFs are highly efficient at processing big volumes with big machinery, but what if we also processed more of that long tail of dirty mixed waste? How much more cumulative ‘inventory’ would that give us?
Co-mingled black bag waste is difficult and costly to process. It’s why most are incinerated or manually sorted. Simply put we need machines that can pick all recyclables from black bag waste.
A robot’s relentlessness could then be exploited – always on, never bored or tired and getting cheaper every year, not more expensive.
Robots that can pick vapes, nappies, batteries or medical waste and can be an essential component of safety systems in cases of conveyor fires.
The non-human working environment is a machine in itself and manufacturing robotics have been the standard for decades.
Robots with grippers/hands that pick like a human wouldn’t need waste pre-sorted into a clean, reduced mix as they can pick through dirty mixed waste.
By removing pre-sorting work like washing, the whole process would be shorter and compensate for admittedly slower sorting speeds.
There are other opportunities too, the MRF could be smaller and sorting could be incorporated far closer to the source material, such as in hospitals, airports, shopping centres, and stadiums. How much more food packaging could be separated from organic waste if it was picked quickly?
How will it work?
This small strategy is not a new idea of course. The EU is funding a university-led project in Greece to create a portable MiniMRF for small island communities to cut the cost of transporting waste to central MRFs.
Project Reclaim uses a variety of technologies clustered together to pick across the mix of black bag waste on a single conveyor.
UK company Advetec is running several innovative projects in the UK and US, including a local authority in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland, to process their small quantities of black bag waste.
Meanwhile, in London, MRFs are being sold to developers because the land is just too valuable, increasing the transportation of waste.
Thinking small to get big results also applies to our industry data. When Barnes & Noble was responding to Amazon’s rise, did they quantify the value of the customer data Amazon were collecting? Did they know how valuable that data would be in predicting customer behaviour? Did anyone?
Would real-time data analysis of our waste also have a value we perhaps haven’t quantified yet?
The role of CIWM
Danu Robotics in Edinburgh is now shipping our small ‘dirty mixed waste’ picking robots, becoming only the second UK robotics manufacturer to serve our industry.
We listened intensively to CIWM members throughout the four-year development process to understand what was needed.
CIWM Trustee Duncan Simpson FCIWM has been very generous in guiding our efforts, especially when it comes to Scotland’s particular challenges. I asked him again for his thoughts on this small strategy.
He said: “Large-scale MRFs are typically centralised and require high volumes of waste to operate efficiently. In countries with dense urban centres, this model works well.
“However, in Scotland, where remote communities, islands, and rural regions present logistical challenges, transporting recyclables long distances to large MRFs is both costly and inefficient.
“They can also be single points of failure if impacted by fire or operational problems throwing contracts and material flows into emergency contingency measures, which can be costly from both an environmental and financial point of view.
“Small-scale MRFs, equipped with robotic sorting systems, present an opportunity to decentralise recycling in Scotland. These compact facilities can be placed closer to waste generation sites, reducing transportation costs and ensuring that materials are processed efficiently.
“Unlike large, centralised facilities that require significant investment, smaller MRFs can be developed incrementally, allowing local authorities to adapt and scale based on waste generation patterns.
“With a relatively small but widely dispersed population, Scotland faces unique waste management challenges. Littering, fly-tipping, and inefficiencies in residual waste collection often hinder recycling efforts.
“Small-scale MRFs can be strategically placed in regions with high waste generation, ensuring localised processing and reducing the environmental impact of transportation.”
In conclusion
Small MRFs and robotic QC picking will always be supplementary to how our ‘big’ centralised industry operates and in practice this strategy depends on robots being capable and cost-effective, which they haven’t been so far.
As manufacturing and eCommerce giants show us though, robotics is inevitable and there are opportunities for those who time their investment well.
The wider impact is even bigger – it could help our society get to the circular economy the world needs.
The post Can we reach our big circular economy goals by thinking small? appeared first on Circular Online.