In today’s economy, consumers and organizations alike are doing everything they can to go green and be as efficient as possible. One major movement for this is recycling, which aims to reduce the amount of waste headed for landfills and helps reuse and conserve valuable resources, reducing the need for fresh materials in creating products and can also lower energy costs for manufacturers.
ZenRobotics Founders Harri Volpola, Jufo Peltomaa and Tuomas Lukka set out to solve a recurring problem among companies with robots: the European Union alone sees about three billion tons of waste each year, and the regional construction industry generates 900 million tons of demolition waste annually. The trio realized that there were problems getting machines to pick up oddly shaped objects, so they put two and two together and decided to create a system that could sort through trash and pick out materials that could be recycled for extra revenue, like wood or metal, in a faster, safer manner than manual sorting.
Currently designed for construction and demolition waste (CND), ZenRobotics Recycler (ZRR) reclaims valuable raw materials (metal, wood and stone) from waste with the help of advanced machine learning technology.
The ZenRobotics Recycler uses multiple sensors, such as visible spectrum cameras, NIR, 3D laser scanners and haptic sensors, to create an accurate, real-time analysis of the waste stream being processed. The ZRR can pick through 1,400 pieces of junk per hour, and sorts waste correctly 95 percent of the time.
ZenRobotics works with SITA, an environmental waste company in Finland that sees about 20,000 tons of waste and uses ZenRobotics Recycler. After the ZRR sorts the material, SITA crushes the stone, burns the wood and sells metals to scrap yards to make new metals.
The company raised about $17 million in funding from Invus, an international equity investor with evergreen capital, and Lifeline Ventures, a Finnish technology accelerator that participated with a minority stake, in September 2012. It has five customers so far and is being distributed through a network of resellers in 49 countries. In April of this year, Lasila & Tikanoja, a Finnish recycling powerhouse, announced it is installing the ZenRobotics Recycler to increase the recycling rate of the facility.
