When it comes to recycling, few materials can match aluminum. It can be reused an infinite number of times, and it’s often cheaper to recycle than to produce new aluminum because it requires so much less energy. Yet only about a third of the aluminum used in the U.S. gets recycled.
The problem lies in sorting mixed aluminum scrap — a challenge that has long stumped the recycling industry.
Michael Siemer, CEO of Sortera, thinks his company has found the key, though. Sortera says it has developed a system that can separate aluminum grades with over 95% accuracy — a breakthrough that could unlock a massive untapped resource in the recycling industry.
Here’s how it works: The company uses an AI model that identifies different grades of aluminum based on data from lasers, X-ray fluorescence, and high-speed cameras. The system has to classify each chip — about the size of a large potato chip — in a fraction of a second. “Ten milliseconds is a long time,” Siemer says. Once the vision system identifies the grade, a series of nozzles blow precise puffs of air to flip the chip off the belt and into the correct bin.
That speed and accuracy matters because other recycling operations must melt the aluminum first before they can tell which type of alloy it is. And if alloys aren’t sorted properly, the mixed heap is worth far less because customers can’t be confident it will have the properties they need.
“People have been wanting to go after [this unsorted aluminum], and nobody’s been able to unlock it,” says Siemer.
Sortera’s sorting accuracy has further helped the company unlock something else many startups seek: profitability. “The margin is exponential above 90%, [while] 92% gets you a nice little margin, 95% gets you a big margin, [and] 98% is a really big m …