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Let’s Go Full Circle! Increasing a Circular Economy🌀

Circularity, a buzz word or the solution to the billions of tons of plastic waste swallowing our planet? We need a transformative approach to help solve this, enter: molecular recycling. This is what Rey Banatao and his team at Google’s X - The Moonshot Factory are working on. The final episode of Where the Internet Lives is out now! Keep reading to hear about how data and AI are helping to drive a more circular economy 🌀

Author

Camryn Kirk
November 20, 2024

— Written by Camryn Kirk

👀 FYI:

If you haven’t read our newsletters recently, Where the Internet Lives is an award-winning mini-documentary series and podcast centered around Google’s data centers and the AI they power. Each week, we’ll be dropping a new video and podcast episode, taking you on an eye-opening journey into how Google’s data infrastructure is shaping community resilience when facing wildfires, power grid overloads, plastic garbage, air pollution, and food waste 👏👀

Americans are Wasteful 🗑️

In 2021, Americans threw away 51 million tons of plastic, but only 5% of it was recycled. That means 48 million tons ended up in landfills, oceans, or scattered in the atmosphere. There is so much in our current landfills that could be repurposed. Instead, we spend hundreds of billions of dollars annually extracting new resources, only to create more waste, perpetuating this unsustainable and toxic cycle. To make matters worse, large regions in the country still don’t have access to proper recycling programs. Compounding the issue, there’s a significant gap in data about what enters our recycling facilities and how best to manage it. Without better insights and solutions, this problem will only grow.

Circularity ♻️

A circular economy means shifting away from our extractive nature and instead reusing resources already above ground. At X - The Moonshot Factory, Google's innovation team is harnessing the power of AI and machine learning to create breakthroughs in waste management. 

They’re able to do so by categorizing waste at a molecular level and experimenting with advanced recycling technologies that can help us increase the amount of plastic recycled. Their main goal is to use data and AI to radically change recycling and reuse for all materials. This is a major unlock to keeping plastic out of our landfills and environment 🔓 X’s partnership with Bay Area based recycler Recology is critical to their goal in chemical recycling, they help provide the materials for X to study and add to their database!

With the combination of new cutting-edge sensors, image recognition, and AI, X can understand the molecular makeup of thousands of types of plastic waste to identify the best recycling pathways. Without the help of data and AI, these thousands of images and data points would be impossible to collect and organize 🤝

Watch our latest episode below to learn more about these breakthroughs made possible by AI & machine learning!

And That’s a Wrap!🎬

Watch the playlist of episodes here: Where the Internet Lives | Season 4 Trailer

Season 4 Episodes:

What was your favorite episode?

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What do you want to see more of? Drop a reply and let us know! We’d love to feature your idea in our next newsletter 💬