Recycling solutions put young innovators in running for EPO prize

Starting out with a treadmill, a camera and a pile of waste, two entrepreneurs - engineers Victor Dewulf and Peter Hedley – are commercialising their intelligent waste sorting system via Recycleye, a business that has raised millions of euros in funding. 

The system is made up of waste recognition and 6-axis robotic sorting solutions that can be used separately or in tandem. Recycleye CTO Hedley explained that Recycleye Vision uses a low-cost camera with RGB sensors to identify each waste item on a conveyor belt using the same visual characteristics as the human eye.

“It achieves this through the machine learning algorithms which power the system, involving models being trained on thousands of images of waste on belts, meaning the system learns, like a child, to recognise items by the correct category,” he said via email. “The vision system operates at 60 frames per second and classifies every item on the belt 120 [times] to increase certainty.”