AI and the War Against Plastic Waste

Plastic waste is one of today’s most complex environmental challenges, and people are putting AI to work to understand it and solve it.

Plastic pollution is easy to visualize given that many rivers are choked with such waste and the oceans are littered with it. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a massive collection of plastic and other debris, is an infamous result of plastics proliferation. Even if you don’t live near a body of water to see the problem firsthand, you’re unlikely to walk far without seeing some piece of plastic crushed underfoot. But untangling this problem is anything but easy.

Enter artificial intelligence, which is being applied to many complex problems that include plastics pollution. InformationWeek spoke to research scientists and startup founders about why plastics waste is such a complicated challenge and how they use AI in their work.

The Plastics Problem

Plastic is ubiquitous today as food packaging, clothing, medical devices, cars, and so much more rely on this material. “Since 1950, nearly 10 billion metric tons of plastic has been produced, and over half of that was just in the last 20 years. So, it’s been this extremely prolific growth in production and use. It’s partially due to just the absolute versatility of plastic,” Chase Brewster, project scientist at Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory, a center for marine conservation at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says.

Plastic isn’t biodegradable and recycling is imperfect. As more plastic is produced and more of it is wasted, much of that waste ends up back in the environment, polluting land and water as it breaks down into microplastics and nanoplastics.

Even when plastic products end up at waste management facilities, processing them is not simple. “A lot of people think of plastic as just plastic,” Bradley Sutliff, a former National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researcher, says.

Der Beitrag AI and the War Against Plastic Waste erschien zuerst auf SwissCognitive | AI Ventures, Advisory & Research.