By Ryan Dezember | Photography and Videos by Parker Michels-Boyce for WSJ

BERLIN, Conn. -- Here's a job the computers can take without much complaint: sorting recyclables.

For humans, it is a foul, laborious job that entails standing over a conveyor belt, plucking beer cans and detergent bottles from a stream of refuse. The job pays little and is hard to fill.

At Murphy Road Recycling's material recovery facility near Hartford, the machines are taking over the dirtiest jobs. A few workers remain on the line, mostly near the front to watch for hazardous items. Otherwise, the system of conveyors, magnets, optical sorters and pneumatic blocks runs largely unmanned.

Watching over it all are computers that analyze material as it passes by at about 7 miles an hour. The devices, made by London-based Greyparrot, use artificial intelligence to identify recyclables, flag food-grade material, gauge items' mass, assess market value and calculate points at which a robotic claw might best clasp each piece.

Environmental concerns and the White House's push to boost domestic production of raw materials have turned attention to America's waste stream, which is full of valuable commodities.

President Trump's 50% aluminum tariff has lifted demand for scrap metal. Meanwhile, pulp mill closures have left box makers more reliant than ever on old corrugated containers. And consumer goods companies want to reclaim their bottles and jugs as states adopt extended producer responsibility laws aimed at reducing plastic pollution.

"There really is value in a lot of recyclables and garbage," said Matanya Horowitz, founder and chief technology officer at AMP, a Colorado company that builds AI-run recycling facilities. "The problem has been that the cost of pulling those materials out is similar to or greater than the actual value of those materials."

Recyclers believe that the AI will allow them to efficiently mine our trash for treasure.

Greyparrot's analyzers were shown recyclables thousands of times, in conditions ranging from crumpled to perfectly intact, until the computers could recognize materials, said Mikela Druckman, the U.K. firm's chief executive. The devices gather data about what is passing through the facility and which items aren't winding up where they belong.

"It's helping us make adjustments to the system to make the cleanest product possible and redeploy our people to where they'll be most effective," said Jonathan Murray, Murphy Road's director of operations.

Murphy Road executives say the technology allows them to sort up to 60 tons an hour of curbside recycling from around Connecticut and western Massachusetts into precisely sorted bales of paper, plastic, aluminum cans and other materials. The material is sold to mills, manufacturers and remelt facilities, which pay more for cleaner bales.

Besides the expense of operating material recovery facilities, known as MRFs, Americans' poor recycling habits are an obstacle to profit. A lot of beer cans and delivery boxes never even make it to sorting centers.

A study of southeastern Virginia's waste stream showed that 28% was recyclable, yet the regional solid-waste system was stuck at a recycling rate of about 7% no matter how much it spent trying to teach people how and what to recycle, said Dennis Bagley, the Southeastern Public Service Authority's executive director.

Meanwhile, the local landfill was filling up. Notwithstanding a costly expansion, it was headed for capacity by 2060, Bagley said.

The authority enlisted AMP to build and operate an automated facility that will take in unsorted garbage and reduce the volume of trash headed to the landfill by half by removing recyclables and organic matter. AMP will sell recyclables and turn the organic waste into biochar, which is similar to charcoal and added to concrete. Biochar production generates carbon credits, which AMP can sell to companies wanting to make up for their own greenhouse gas emissions.

AMP also gets a $50-a-ton tipping fee for the waste that arrives at the plant, which started up two years ago and is undergoing the first of a few planned capacity expansions.

The authority in November signed a 20-year pact with AMP, which has agreed to pay damages whenever it fails to divert 50% of the volume from the landfill.

"They've done that routinely since the plant has opened," Bagley said. "We have no reason to think they won't be able to continue that."

The big breakthrough in recycling technology has been combining vision recognition systems with pneumatic blocks. Using puffs of air to separate items has proved much faster and more accurate than robotic pickers, which are limited to about 40 items a minute, compared with thousands for pneumatic systems, said Pete Keller, vice president of recycling and sustainability at Republic Services.

"Because of the speed, because of the throughput capabilities, we're starting to see these economies where these are very good investments," Keller said. "And that's not about labor; that's about recovery rates, value extraction, purity and quality."

AI technology has been installed in about one-third of Republic's 79 recycling facilities, he said. The country's second-largest waste firm, Republic is emphasizing plastic recycling and building the third of four planned polymer centers in Allentown, Pa.

The centers -- up and running in Indianapolis and Las Vegas -- serve as hubs where plastics gathered at its other facilities are sorted by type and color and turned into flakes that are sold to packaged goods companies for new bottles and jugs.

Waste Management, the largest U.S. trash hauler and recycler, is spending more than $1.4 billion building and automating recycling facilities. The company, which goes by WM, reported an 18% increase in third-quarter profit in its recycling processing and sales segment despite commodity prices being 35% lower than a year earlier. Automation lifted the value of its output and reduced operating expenses, such as labor.

Job loss was a concern in Virginia when the communities involved considered the AMP plan, Bagley said. His retort was that hardly anyone wanted those jobs.

"I told them, quite frankly, as a society, we shouldn't expect people to do that," he said. "We've got too much technology."

Write to Ryan Dezember at ryan.dezember@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

January 07, 2026 12:00 ET (17:00 GMT)

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