Driving strategic change in waste and recycling with advanced technology and business model innovation

AMP was founded to modernize recycling by applying artificial intelligence (AI) to lower the cost of sorting and bring greater efficiencies to the industry. Over the years the company has evolved to deliver on this vision, and today, we design, build and operate transformative recycling facilities. With near-zero manual sorting, unprecedented reliability and pervasive data, these facilities make the recovery of commodities safer and more cost-effective than ever and have grown to encompass municipal solid waste (MSW) sorting, previously out of reach to the industry.

With a long career in waste management, I recognized the unique potential of AMP’s approach, and joined the team to help scale our AMP ONE facilities model and bring operational excellence to more communities, municipalities and companies.

With some 60 patents and the deepest database for materials identification, developed over nearly a decade of operating, AMP now offers sortation-as-a-service. Through this business model, we design, build and operate facilities for a per-ton processing fee so our customers can focus on material flows while we manage daily operations, maintenance, upgrades and plantwide optimization.

By operating and maintaining the system, we’re able to make performance commitments and offer competitive pricing, often below customers’ internal cost to operate.

Single-stream processing

Our AMP ONE solution operates with minimal human intervention and is custom-designed to process 10,000-150,000 tons of material per year. When you build AI capabilities into a facility from the outset, you can optimize its design around the technology. This approach supports orders-of-magnitude changes in how next-generation facilities can perform. It’s not just that you need fewer sorters; you can operate without manual sorting altogether and add shifts more easily given the automation and reduction in variable costs. The deployment of vision systems throughout a facility provides the ability to monitor every line continuously.

As material flows through the system, AI-powered jets separate commodities, ensuring accuracy and efficient recovery. Because we target materials continuously, we’re able to achieve precise sortation, leading to superior overall recovery and material purity.

Our business model also means our customers do not tie up resources in building and operating recycling plants. We take on that responsibility, end-to-end. This allows governments to steward public resources more effectively and private companies to focus investments on core business activities.

Building on our success at other plants around the country, we’re constructing a full-scale single-stream processing plant in Colorado this year with Waste Connections. The facility will feature an AMP ONE system, where every element is designed to work seamlessly together to deliver optimal performance, to process some 35 tons of source-separated single-stream recyclables per hour.

Redefining waste economics

While our sortation-as-a-service model holds great potential for communities that have recycling programs, many communities lack them. There are myriad reasons why, but it means recycling has, to a degree, plateaued.

But advancements in sorting that allow for the separation of commodities and organic material directly from MSW can change the trajectory of recycling rates. To increase recovery and overall diversion, we’re going deeper into the waste stream, processing MSW and other waste flows.

Extracting material very close to where it’s generated produces significant transportation savings; it also allows access to the entirety of the material stream, not just what people place in their recycling bins. MSW diversion enabled by AI-powered solutions helps extend the life of landfills, reduces their environmental impact and keeps disposal costs low.

Some 18 months ago AMP began processing MSW in Virginia, extracting mixed recyclables and organic material directly from bagged trash. This highly efficient system runs about 25 tons per hour with over 90 percent uptime—an unprecedented level of reliability with a footprint that previously hasn’t been feasible economically. Equipped with this system, the transfer station is capable of diverting more than 60 percent of landfill-bound material for further processing with organic management and mixed recyclables sorting systems.

The success of this facility has opened the door to an exciting new project through which we intend to process some 500,000 tons per year of municipally collected MSW.

Recovered recyclables will be marketed while the organics will be processed through a biochar system that converts the material into carbon black, simultaneously capturing and sequestrating carbon. The resulting carbon credits can then be sold on the open market, creating additional revenue streams.

In regions with established organics processing infrastructure, the sorted organics stream could move into those facilities.

This approach to MSW processing significantly will extend the life of the regional landfill, providing the communities served with an assured, affordable disposal outlet for decades to come.

Building on a legacy of robotics

The AMP of today, providing sorting systems at facility scale, is fulfilling an early vision for the company. Our proprietary vision system has seen over 200 billion items, built on and informed by 400-plus systems deployed around the world and gathering data for as many as 10 years across millions of tons sorted. We’ve developed and refined our neural network architecture with the knowledge of what actually works in this industry.

We’re tackling larger projects and, most importantly, delivering real outcomes for waste companies and municipalities—by lowering sortation costs, capturing more material value, diverting organic waste and extending landfill life—all while helping the industry optimize its strategic assets.

While many of our largest projects are now around facility-scale sorting, the robotics systems we pioneered support nearly 100 recycling facilities around the world. We’ll continue to provide value for all of our customers; our evolution reflects our view of how best to serve waste and recycling leaders and advance our mission.

We remain committed to our long-term vision to transform and modernize the recycling and waste management industry.