This is probably the most unpleasant job in the world – trash sorter. It is smelly, boring and intense. The job exists because citizens throw all types of garbage into the same bin. Trash trucks take everything in the bin and pour them onto a conveyor belt. The belt rolls with the pulley in front of the recycling workers, who spend days after days watching the belt rolling and sorting them out.

Till 2018, recycling companies still rely on manual labor to categorize materials, since the assembly lines in recycling factories neither produce identical output nor have repeatable processes. According to a study released by the University of Illinois, recycling workers are more than twice as likely to be injured at work as the average worker. Seventeen American recycling workers died on the job from 2011 to 2013.

“I was created to do this job,” said Max, a robotic sorter created by Bulk Handling System (BHS) with the artificial intelligence technology. Fundamentally, Max identifies recyclables in a similar way to a person. A process called “deep learning” runs through hundreds of thousands of images to train neural networks to “think out” the correct identification. Once built these neural networks resemble the architecture of the brain and, when paired with a camera, will correctly identify the items in our recycling stream.

Max is volunteering at just the right time. The dedicated mechanical sorter is widely welcomed, as China’s ban on plastic trash import lends urgency to upgrading the recycling industry in the exporting countries. Now that the world’s biggest trash importer only allows half percent of contamination, the recycling plants need to double or triple sort the product before the shipment. Companies are getting squeezed on a number of levels. Now they are anxiously seeking every possible way to reduce labor cost.

BHS has three sites in the U.S. and three in Europe. Two waste management companies in the U.K., Viridor and Green Recycling, have invested in Max-AI, expecting to upgrade their processing line, according to the companies’ websites.

More companies than just BHS are dedicated to developing smart machines to cater for that need. Moblieye, a vehicle manufacturer, recently designed an electronic trash truck for heavier city distribution and refuse transport operations with gross weights of up to 27 tons.

“Chinese government is allowing a window for imports, but the quality has to be there,” said Brett Johns, Director of Sales, Marketing, and Procurement at City Fibers, a family recycling company in Los Angeles. Johns said that they need robots to help improve quality. “We are looking at the elimination of probably ten to twenty percent of human jobs positions,” he said.

China’s import ban is not the only reason for Max to exist. “Automation has been a trend in the last ten to fifteen years,” Nick Morell said. He is the Recycling Coordinator from Sanitation District of Los Angeles County (LACSD).

According to Morell, the agency currently relies on both mechanical and human sorters to run its processing line. “It will be out of service in next 12 months. As we put in a new mechanical sorting line,” he said, adding that LACSD is about to sign a contract with BHS to optimize their facilities this October. This means the current employed sorters will be soon out of jobs.

Morell said they were temporary labors through contracts, so they would be either reassigned to other facilities or temporarily laid off as “they are not gonna work on the line anymore”.

While sorting trash is unpleasant, it can be worse for people to lose jobs.”This conversation should not be about jobs.”said Peter Raschio in an email. He is the marketing manager of the company. Raschio argued that automation might result in the the loss of sorting position for a future hire, but those positions were not “sustainable, long-term jobs”.

Steve Miller, CEO of BHS, believed that the impact on labors would be positive. He said in an interview that the increased efficiency in assembly line could cut recycling costs and create more jobs at paper mills, plastic recyclers, and other firms that reuse raw materials.

“I would say that green jobs are going away as automation progress,” Morell said on the contrary. He predicted that green jobs in the future would be more about quality control, engineering and processing line. “It would be almost like the mining operation — the way things are ground up and that they use magnet and optical sorters. There’s not a lot of people involved in those process until you are dealing marketing and commodities,” he said.

The newest Recycling Economic Information (REI) released by the environmental protection agency (EPA) shows that the estimated recycling jobs have declined from 2001 to 2016 national wide, including those in iron and steel mills, non-ferrous foundries and glass container manufacturing plants. The number of plastic converters dropped from 178,700 to 30,535 during the 15 years. Firms that reuse raw materials in all categories of scrap commodities, except for rubber, have seen a decreasing demand for recycling workers. Miller’s optimistic outlook might not come true in the short term.

(Professor Dowell Myers, Director of the Population Dynamics Research Group in at the University of Southern California, commenting on automation’s impact on labors)

(Labor union comments, hopefully with anecdotes)

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