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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 USA alone, and $400 billion price of products are exported on them yearly.
Nonetheless, loading packing containers onto these pallets is a process caught previously: Heavy hundreds and repetitive actions go away employees 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 Eighties.
Jacobi Robotics, a startup spun out of the labs of the College of California, Berkeley, says it will possibly vastly pace up that course of with AI. If profitable, Jacobi goals to exchange 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. Typically known as the chasing arrows, this stamp is used on packaging to recommend it’s recyclable.
These little arrows suggest a pleasant story, portray an image of a world the place the fabric will probably 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 surroundings.
Researchers have been working to handle the issue by arising with new recycling strategies, generally known as superior, or chemical, recycling. However this new method shares a number of challenges with different recycling strategies. Learn the total story.
—Casey Crownhart
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