Recycling automation startup Glacier brings in $7.7M

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Glacier’s recycling sorting robot is able to sort up 45 items a minute. | Source: Glacier

Amazon.com Inc.’s Climate Pledge Fund recently invested in Glacier, an artificial intelligence and robotics company that aims to help the recycling industry work toward a world without waste. The investment firm said the funding is part of its ongoing commitment to support entrepreneurs and female-led companies in climate tech.

“Nearly 70 million tons of recycling are processed annually in the U.S. alone. This is already an immense undertaking, but we can recover so much more material by building accessible automation processes and then scaling it across our country’s recycling infrastructure,” Areeb Malik, co-founder of Glacier, said in a release. “That’s what Glacier is doing.”

The San Francisco-based company uses AI-powered robots to automate the sorting of recyclables. It collects real-time data on recycling streams fore recycling companies and consumer brands.

Glacier has also announced that it will be collaborating with Amazon to enhance traceability and recovery processes for recyclables. Its latest funding round, totaling $7.7 million, also included participation from New Enterprise Associates (NEA), AlleyCorp, Overture Climate VC, and VSC Ventures.

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Glacier aims to help recycling industry reach its full potential

Malik and Rebecca Hu said they co-founded Glacier to make a positive impact on the climate crisis. Despite the potential of recycling as a climate solution, today only 21% of residential recyclables in the U.S. are actually recycled. This is often due to a lack of recycling infrastructure, they said.

“After researching a variety of climate solutions, we discovered that applying novel advances in AI and robotic automation to help the recycling industry run more efficiently is a powerful way to reduce waste, which has a direct link to reducing carbon emissions,” stated Hu.

Glacier said its robots can improve sorting and recycling rates to help prevent valuable materials, like metals and plastics, from ending up in landfills and oceans. The company’s approach to recycling innovation combines two core technologies.

The first is Glacier’s proprietary AI model, which is capable of identifying more than 30 categories of recyclable materials in real time. This includes things as broad as PET plastic and as narrow as a toothpaste tube. The company said the combination of this AI model with its custom-designed robot delivers consistent recyclable sorting power with minimal implementation costs.

Glacier added that its potential impact on the circular economy extends beyond its sorting robot. Its software and AI are generating a recycling data set to help recycling facilities and brands make better-informed decisions.

“We’re constantly looking for ways to improve recycling, and developing robots is just the first step,” said Malik.

“Our recycling AI is a powerful tool for everyone in the circular economy, and it couldn’t come at a more important time,” said Hu. “As we see mounting legislative, economic, and social pressure to recycle better, brands are using our data to measure and improve how their packaging is being recycled, while recycling facilities are using our data to improve their operations and rescue more recyclables from landfill. We’re thrilled to be collaborating with a circular-economy leader like Amazon so that we can accelerate our mission to end waste.”

Keeping plastic out of landfills and oceans

Glacier claimed that just one of its robots can prevent over 10 million items per year from ending up in landfills. In the near term, the company said its technology can help improve the quality of recycling content. This way, more post-consumer material is available for use in new packaging.

In the longer term, Glacier’s founders said they hope to enable recycling for more types of packaging and materials that are not currently recycled. This is why Amazon is collaborating with Glacier to pilot a sortation project for novel biomaterials.

Amazon said its vision is to reduce plastic use and shift toward materials that are bio-based, as well as those that are biodegradable and compostable. This includes testing new biomaterials for applications without other sustainable solutions, such as some flexible plastics, and then recycling them.