Earlier than virtually any merchandise reaches your door, it traverses the worldwide provide chain on a pallet. Greater than 2 billion pallets are in circulation in america alone, and $400 billion price of products are exported on them yearly.
Nonetheless, loading packing containers onto these pallets is a activity caught prior to now: Heavy masses and repetitive actions depart employees at excessive danger of damage, and within the uncommon cases when robots are used, they take months to program utilizing handheld computer systems which have modified little for the reason that Eighties.
Jacobi Robotics, a startup spun out of the labs of the College of California, Berkeley, says it may vastly velocity up that course of with AI. If profitable, Jacobi goals to interchange the legacy strategies clients are at present 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. Generally known as the chasing arrows, this stamp is used on packaging to recommend it’s recyclable.
These little arrows indicate a pleasant story, portray an image of a world the place the fabric might be recycled into a brand new product, forming an countless loop of reuse. However the actuality of plastics recycling as we speak 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 deal with the issue by developing with new recycling strategies, typically known as superior, or chemical, recycling. However this new strategy shares just a few challenges with different recycling strategies. Learn the total story.
—Casey Crownhart