Our mission

End human waste sorting forever with autonomous robots while delivering shippable intermediate products.

Why

First it should be stated that Easysort should never exist. The EU chased quick results, and pushed the responsibility of waste sorting onto the individual as opposed to funding the necessary infrastructure. This is not right. Easysort is fixing this problem.

The main reasons complete automated waste sorting hasn't happened yet is: 1) the cost of the technology is too high and 2) the recognition systems are not good enough. Having one central system pushing the technology forward, and making that technology as cheap as possible, is one way to solve both problems.

Crucial technology should be so cheap that basically no one profits. This is why Easysort is open source. Let's make one good solution for everyone, and make it free for the world to use, improve and build on.

Identifying the problem

Most technology to sort waste already exists. Most is too expensive and kept out of reach for most facilities by the companies behind it. Easysort takes these technologies and builds bridges to make them available at a price that makes sense.

EU has taken the path of source seperation (you as a citizen need to sort your waste). This is not the best path, but since this was chose, many companies and facilities have been build around it. Most solutions currently on the market are built for full scale sorting facilities. Current sorting facilities are rather old, have highly specific operations and not designed for the future. We need to slowly convert these into fully automated facilities in a cost effective way. Easysort is a solution to this problem.

Open-source

We want to free people from the burden of waste sorting with a solution owned by the public. In this way, no company can control and use technology as it is freely available to everyone. All our projects, plans and daily communication are free for everyone to see and use.

Vision

Long term, Easysort will have or supply tools for large sorting facilities sorting all your waste into specific fractions for recycling centers to use. Short term, Easysort sells intermediate AI monitoring products to waste sorting facilities to help them sort and understand waste. This helps us test our technology, we make an impact from day one, and prepare for our own facilities.

Is this still relevant in 20 years?

When working on anything, it is important to consider long term viability. Let's spend a few minutes thinking about this.

First off, waste is always going to exist. Even with new production methods, being able to easily construct new kinds of plastics that don't have to be recycled, there will still be waste that has to be sorted. Some waste can't be burned, and some waste can't be composted. Fractions has to be split somehow, and a good detection system is in the center of that.

Secondly, an extremely high-performing detection system is useful not only in waste sorting, but in many other applications. Although most robotic applications mostly use end-2-end systems, having good detections systems is key to 1) gathering specific data for training in difficult environments and 2) non-robotic applications. For this reason, we believe developing a good detection system is a good investment, and will be useful as we move to complete robotic sorting with end-2-end systems.