Earlier than nearly any merchandise reaches your door, it traverses the worldwide provide chain on a pallet. Greater than 2 billion pallets are in circulation in the US alone, and $400 billion value of products are exported on them yearly.
Nonetheless, loading packing containers onto these pallets is a process caught prior to now: Heavy hundreds and repetitive actions depart staff at excessive threat of harm, and within the uncommon cases when robots are used, they take months to program utilizing handheld computer systems which have modified little because the Nineteen Eighties.
Jacobi Robotics, a startup spun out of the labs of the College of California, Berkeley, says it will probably vastly velocity up that course of with AI. If profitable, Jacobi goals to switch the legacy strategies prospects are at the moment utilizing to coach their bots, whittling down the time it takes to code a paletting course of from months to a single day. Learn the total story.
—James O’Donnell
Right here’s the issue with new plastic recycling strategies
Look on the underside of a plastic water bottle or takeout container, and also you may discover a brand there made up of three arrows forming a closed loop formed like a triangle. Typically referred to as the chasing arrows, this stamp is used on packaging to counsel it’s recyclable.
These little arrows indicate a pleasant story, portray an image of a world the place the fabric shall be recycled into a brand new product, forming an infinite loop of reuse. However the actuality of plastics recycling at this time doesn’t match as much as that concept. Solely about 10% of the plastic ever made has been recycled; the overwhelming majority winds up in landfills or within the atmosphere.
Researchers have been working to handle the issue by developing with new recycling strategies, typically referred to as superior, or chemical, recycling. However this new method shares just a few challenges with different recycling strategies. Learn the total story.
—Casey Crownhart
