Recycleye places four new units in UK facility

Bryson Recycling, a United Kingdom-based social enterprise that operates a material recovery facility (MRF), has ordered four additional robotic sorters made by London-based Recycleye Robotics. The Bryson MRF in Mallusk, Northern Ireland, installed an initial Recycleye robot in 2021.

“This four-fold investment increase marks the first announced robot re-purchase in the U.K. and Ireland,” according to Recycleye.

The equipment firm says Bryson decided to purchase additional robots “to build on the successful operation of an existing artificial intelligence (AI)-powered Recycleye Robotics solution on its fiber line.”

The additional units, says Recycleye, are expected to improve material quality, maximize recycling, reduce residual waste and reduce costs.

“We have decided to purchase four further robots from Recycleye following the great results from the first one – almost 8,500 run hours, with around 5,000 kilograms (11,000 pounds) of materials picked per week, and with an availability greater than 98 percent,” says Jaroslaw Stanislawek, Bryson’s engineering manager. “We feel confident this new installation will further improve the consistency in our material quality.”

“Investments such as this enable us to stay on top of the benefits of new technology,” remarks Katy Fulton, a director at Bryson Recycling. “We are a significant local employer, and that means running a profitable business that is open to change and innovation.”

Recycleye CEO Victor Dewulf comments, “We are delighted that Bryson Recycling has chosen to continue working with us to build on their initial investment in our AI-powered [recycling] robots. This is a strong statement of confidence in the value Recycleye robots bring to [materials] sorting and to the economics of materials recovery, and we are proud to be able to support Bryson.”

The four new robots will be retrofitted in the main sorting cabin at the company’s MRF, which is on the outskirts of Belfast and employs more than 100 people. Two of the four robots will be installed over a fiber line with the objective of picking non-paper items such as plastics, cans and cardboard to reduce contamination.

The remaining two robots will operate on a residual line, where they will target the removal of recyclable materials with the aim of diverting higher volumes into recycling end markets rather than to a waste-to-energy outlet.

The robots will be programmed to perform the physical tasks of identifying, picking and placing materials and will “operate alongside, but separate, to human operatives, who continue to work in the company’s facilities,” states Recycleye.

Recycleye refers to an “AI computer vision system” as being able to detect “all individual items” in the materials stream.

Bryson Recycling collects and processes materials from more than 50 percent of homes in Northern Ireland and employs more than 350 people at 12 sites in Northern Ireland, Ireland and Wales.