TrashBots in Seattle
Recology has been recycling long before there was even an industry for it. The company’s founders immigrated to San Francisco in the mid-1800s looking for opportunity, eventually finding work doing what no one else wanted to do – picking up other people’s garbage. They sorted through trash to find salvageable material by washing, packaging, and selling bottles, and sorting and separating rags and papers from other refuse materials.
Today, Recology is an integrated resource recovery company, providing materials collection, processing, commodity sales, and outreach and education to customers throughout California, Oregon, and Washington. Recology finds new and innovative ways to process and reuse what was once considered waste, collecting and recovering recyclables to be re-purposed into new products. Recology is 100% employee-owned, with over 3,600 employees throughout its 60 facilities on the west coast.
On average, Recology recovers over 600 million pounds of recyclables each year, implementing recycling programs and building infrastructure at its facilities to reduce landfill-bound materials. With diversion and recovery goals in mind, Recology’s King County operation has partnered with CleanRobotics to pilot the TrashBot technology.
TrashBots have been installed at Recology’s Administrative office, as well as the company’s state-of-the-art Material Recovery Facility and Education Center in the Seattle area.
“Recology hopes to showcase TrashBot technology as an innovative approach to an important problem,” explains Derek Ruckman, Vice President & Group Manager of Recology’s Pacific Northwest operations. “TrashBots provide an opportunity to engage and educate consumers at the primary point of interaction – those precious few seconds spent tossing materials into the bin.”