 |
|
|
|||||
Every week, millions of Americans toss their recyclables into a single bin, trusting that their plastic bottles, aluminum cans, and cardboard boxes will be given a new life. But what really happens after the truck picks them up? Single-stream recycling makes participating in recycling easy, but behind the scenes, complex sorting systems and contamination mean a large percentage of that material never gets a second life. Reports in recent years have found 15% to 25% of all the materials picked up from recycle bins ends up in landfills instead. Plastics are among the biggest challenges. Only about 9% of the plastic generated in the U.S. actually gets recycled, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Some plastic is incinerated to produce energy, but most of the rest ends up in landfills instead. So, what makes plastic recycling so difficult? As an engineer whose work focuses on reprocessing plastics, I have been exploring potential solutions. How does single-stream recycling work? In cities that use single-stream recycling, consumers put all of their recyclable materialspaper, cardboard, plastic, glass, and metalinto a single bin. Once collected, the mixed recyclables are taken to a materials recovery facility, where they are sorted. First, the mixed recyclables are shredded and crushed into smaller fragments, enabling more effective separation. The mixed fragments pass over rotating screens that remove cardboard and paper, allowing heavier materials, including plastics, metals and glass, to continue along the sorting line. Magnets are used to pick out ferrous metals, such as steel. A magnetic field that produces an electrical current with eddies sends nonferrous metals, such as aluminum, into a separate stream, leaving behind plastics and glass. The glass fragments are removed from the remaining mix using gravity or vibrating screens. That leaves plastics as the primary remaining material. While single-stream recycling is convenient, it has downsides. Contamination, such as food residue, plastic bags, and items that cant be recycled, can degrade the quality of the remaining material, making it more difficult to reuse. That lowers its value. Having to remove that contamination raises processing costs and can force recovery centers to reject entire batches. Which plastics typically cant be recycled? Each recycling program has rules for which items it will and wont take. You can check which items can and cannot be recycled for your specific program on your municipal page. Often, that means checking the recycling code stamped on the plastic next to the recycling icon. These are the toughest plastics to recycle and most likely to be excluded in your local recycling program: Symbol 3 Polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, found in pipes, shower curtains and some food packaging. It may contain harmful additives such as phthalates and heavy metals. PVC also degrades easily, and melting can release toxic fumes during recycling, contaminating other materials and making it unsafe to process in standard recycling facilities. Symbol 4 Low-density polyethylene, or LDPE, is often used in plastic bags and shrink-wrap. Because its flexible and lightweight, its prone to getting tangled in sorting machinery at recycling plants. Symbol 6 Polystyrene, often used in foam cups, takeout containers and packing peanuts. Because its lightweight and brittle, its difficult to collect and process and easily contaminates recycling streams. Which plastics to include That leaves three plastics that can be recycled in many facilities: Symbol 1 Polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, widely used in soda bottles. Symbol 2 High-density polyethylene, or HDPE, commonly used in milk jugs and laundry detergent bottles. Symbol 5 Polypropylene, PP, used in products such as pill bottles, yogurt cups, and plastic utensils. However, these arent accepted in some facilities for reasons Ill explain. Taking apart plastics, bead by bead Some plastics can be chemically recycled or ground up for reprocessing, but not all plastics play well together. Simple separation methods, such as placing ground-up plastics in water, can easily remove your soda bottle plastic (PET) from the mixture. The ground-up PET sinks in water due to the plastics density. However, HDPE, used in milk jugs, and PP, found in yogurt cups, both float, and they cant be recycled together. So, more advanced and expensive technology, such as infrared spectroscopy, is often required to separate those two materials. Once separated, the plastic from your soda bottle can be chemically recycled through a process called solvolysis. It works like this: Plastic materials are formed from polymers. A polymer is a molecule with many repeating units, called monomers. Picture a pearl necklace. The individual pearls are the repeating monomer units. The string that runs through the pearls is the chemical bond that joins the monomer units together. The entire necklace can then be thought of as a single molecule. During solvolysis, chemists break down that necklace by cutting the string holding the pearls together until they are individual pearls. Then, they string those pearls together again to create new necklaces. Other chemical recycling methods, such as pyrolysis and gasification, have drawn environmental and health concerns because the plastic is heated, which can release toxic fumes. But chemical recycling also holds the potential to reduce both plastic waste and the need for new plastics, while generating energy. The problem of yogurt cups and milk jugs The other two common types of recycled plasticsitems such as yogurt cups (PP) and milk jugs (HDPE)are like oil and water: Each can be recycled through reprocessing, but they dont mix. If polyethylene and polypropylene arent completely separated during recycling, the resulting mix can be brittle and generally unusable for creating new products. Chemists are working on solutions that could increase the quality of recycled plastics through mechanical reprocessing, typically done at separate facilities. One promising mechanical method for recycling mixed plastics is to incorporate a chemical called a compatibilizer. Compatibilizers contain the chemical structure of multiple different polymers in the same molecule. Its like how lecithin, commonly found in egg yolks, can help mix oil and water to make mayonnaisepart of the lecithin molecule is in the oil phase and part is in the water phase. In the case of yogurt cups and milk jugs, recently developed block copolymers are able to produce recycled plastic materials with the flexibility of polyethylene and the strength of polypropylene. Improving recycling Research like this can make recycled materials more versatile and valuable and move products closer to a goal of a circular economy without waste. However, improving recycling also requires better recycling habits. You can help the recycling process by taking a few minutes to wash off food waste, avoiding putting plastic bags in your recycling bin and, importantly, paying attention to what can and cannot be recycled in your area. Alex Jordan is an associate professor of plastics engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Category:
E-Commerce
Jack in the Box announced Wednesday that it will close between 150 and 200 underperforming restaurants as part of a broad restructuring effort, with approximately 80 to 120 restaurants shuttering by December 31, 2025. The remainder will close over time, based on the termination dates of their respective franchise agreements. Fast Company reached out to Jack in the Box for a list of locations it will be closing, but did not hear back by time of publishing. The initiative is part of the companys JACK on Track strategya comprehensive plan aimed at improving long-term financial performance across its restaurant system, strengthening its balance sheet, and reaffirming its commitment to an asset-light business model, all in pursuit of sustainable growth, according to a company press release. As part of the strategy, Jack in the Box has also retained BofA Securities to explore strategic alternatives for the Del Taco brand, including the potential sale of the business. Our actions today focus on three main areas: addressing our balance sheet to accelerate cash flow and pay down debt, while preserving growth-oriented capital investments related to technology and restaurant reimage; closing underperforming restaurants to position ourselves for consistent net unit growth and competitive unit economics; and, an overall return to simplicity for the Jack in the Box business model and investor story, said Lance Tucker, chief executive officer at Jack in the Box. The company also released select preliminary results in the press release for the second quarter of fiscal year 2025, which ended April 13. Same-store sales declined 4.4% for the Jack in the Box brand, while Del Taco saw a 3.6% decrease. Jack in the Box said in the press release that it will no longer provide financial guidance for Del Taco as it explores a sale. One of the largest hamburger chains in the U.S., Jack in the Box operates approximately 2,200 restaurants across 22 states, with a strong presence on the West Coast. Del Taco has approximately 600 restaurants across 17 states. Shares were down around 13% on Thursday morning. Over the past year, the stock has lost more than half its value.
Category:
E-Commerce
Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Companys weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week here. Coming soon: The one-person, billion-dollar startup Were beginning to see a new kind of lean startup company, enabled in large part by new AI agents. Since these companies rely far less on people power, some of themthe ones addressing real market needsare achieving extraordinary revenue-per-employee numbers. AI coding tools could become major enablers of these lightly staffed AI startups, simply because theyre starting to automate software development tasks that once required a human designer or engineer. The makers of these coding tools provide early examples of such startups. We are seeing the rise of the AI-first company, where tech companies use AI and agents to complete tasks before hiring employees, says Jeremiah Owyang, general partner at Blitzscaling Ventures. A few notable examples: Anysphere, the company behind the Cursor AI coding tool, has only about 20 employees. By the end of 2024, its annual recurring revenue (ARR) had reached $100 millionroughly $5 million per employee. Now, TechCrunch reports that its ARR has surged to $300 million in 2025, bringing its per-employee revenue to $15 million. (Anysphere was named one of Fast Companys Most Innovative Companies in the Applied AI category.) The company has reportedly turned down several buyout offers, including one from OpenAI, to remain independent. Another AI coding tool maker, Windsurf (formerly known as Codeium) has reached $40 million in ARR, up from $12 million at the end of 2024. With around 170 employees, this implies a revenue-per-employee figure of approximately $235,000. OpenAI is reportedly in advanced talks to acquire Windsurf for around $3 billion, or about $17 million per employee. A South Korean startup called Nari Labs, with just two employees, recently unveiled a new text-to-speech model called Dia that may outperform category leaders ElevenLabs and Sesame in terms of voice authenticity. Voice samples posted to X by the company appear to support this claim. Nari Labs has shared its model on GitHub and could potentially build a business around licensing future models. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday. Midjourney, the creator of the well-known text-to-image AI tool, has kept a lean profile, with only about 10 employees. PitchBook estimates that by the end of 2024, the company was generating approximately $200 million in annual recurring revenuearound $20 million per employee. A lesser-known AI company, Nexad, which develops and deploys AI-native advertising within AI applications, has just six employees but has already reached 30 million users through its chat app partnerships. Founded in 2024, the startup has secured $6 million in seed funding in a round co-led by Andreessen Horowitzs Speedrun accelerator and Prosus Ventures. This trend will only continue as companies realize they can gain efficiencies by using software for repeatable tasks, says Blitzscaling Ventures Owyang, while reserving human talent for strategy, innovation, creativity, leadership, and community. These AI-first companies are becoming more viable as AI models improve. The generative AI boom began with models that could string words together in useful ways, but only recently have models gained the ability to reason independently and work through processes with a degree of autonomy and agency. The place where this ability is having the greatest impact today is in AI coding assistants, but many expect AI agents to take over other tasks, like invoicing and customer support, that were formerly the sole province of humans. In the future, when Company A wants to buy from Company B, it could be a matter of two AI agents working together to open the business relationship. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speculated in early 2024 that because of AI agents, a billion-dollar company employing one individual might be created. In fact, Altman said he has a running bet with some of his peers on when such a unicorn might appear. That day might be coming sooner than we think. It might even go further than Altman envisions, Owyang says: In a future that once seemed like science fictionbut may be just a few years awaywe could see companies comprised entirely of AI agents, with no clear indication of whether any humans are at the helm. Why OpenAI buying Chrome could face antitrust headwinds A federal court ruled last August that Google holds a monopoly on internet search. This week, the court is working to determine a list of remedies to address that antitrust issue. Federal antitrust officials are urging Judge Amit Mehta to order Google to sell its Chrome browser, which acts as a major funnel of user traffic to Google Search. Google earns the majority of its revenue by selling ads around search results and referring users to brands when they search for products. Depending on the buyer, selling Chrome might fix one monopoly only to create another a few years down the line. OpenAIs head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley, testified that his company would be willing to purchase the popular browser, which could fetch as much as $20 billion, according to Bloomberg. That would place the browser in the hands of a company currently building its own internet search business. OpenAI licenses Bing search data and is developing its own search index. The company reportedly tried to license Googles search datathe most complete inventory of the webs contentsbut was denied. The Justice Department has also proposed requiring Google to license its search index to other search competitors. “To grow further, OpenAI needs to move beyond supplying models and start owning the customer connection,” says Info-Tech principal research director Brian Jackson. “Gaining control over a major browser like Chrome would expand its reach and create new data opportunities, while helping it better compete with Google and its Gemini platform.” OpenAI is among the first companies to offer an alternative to the classic Google search thats become almost reflexive for many webusers. Instead of returning a list of most relevant links, ChatGPT, Perplexity and other chatbots return a direct answer to a users question, in narrative form (Google has its own AI search format called AI Overviews). Instead of doing searches from Chrome (by either using the URL bar or right-clicking on search terms) Ive found that using a chatbot desktop app, which typically display a handy little prompt window triggered by a keyboard shortcut, is just as easy and often yields more useful results, depending on the type of search. A ChatGPT-optimized Chrome could provide another easy entry pointone that far more people would likely use. In that experience you might highlight something in the browser, right-click, and see a search with ChatGPT menu item where search with Google used to be. Of course, that would create a major advantage for OpenAI in search, while other AI search providers such as Google, Perplexity, and Anthropic could be put at a disadvantage. If AI search continues to grow in popularity, theres a real chance that it becomes the dominant way of searching the web at some point in the future. Does that make OpenAI the next search giant? Meta rolls out new AI features in its Ray-Ban AR glasses Im excited about Metas Ray-Ban smart glasses, both because of their stylish design (theyre not bulky or awkward), and their potential to integrate useful AI features. Meta has chosen a great feature to lead with: On Wednesday, the company began rolling out its live translation capability to smart glasses users in all markets. (The feature was first teased back in October.) In effect, people will be able to travel abroad and hold reasonably smoothif occasionally clunkyconversations with speakers of different languages. When the microphones on the glasses hear a different language, the words are sent to an AI server in the cloud, which then sends the translated words back down and through the glasses earphones. And, in a nod to on-device AI, Meta allows users to download language packs directly to the glasses, enabling offline translation without a network connection. For now, live translation supports English, French, Italian, and Spanish, with more languages on the way. Meta also seemed to move up the timeline for another AI featureLive AI, in which the AI continually watches the live view from the devices cameras in order to assist the user in things they may be doing. If it sees food preparation, the Meta assistant might offer recipes from the web or substitutes for missing ingredients, or if the user is exploring a new neighborhood it might supply mapping or navigation features. Meta now says Live AI is coming soon to general availability in the U.S. and Canada. Live AI gives a feel for how Meta has hoped AI would enhance the user experience in its smart glasses. More AI coverage from Fast Company: Microsoft thinks AI colleagues are coming soon Trump is reportedly drafting an executive order to integrate AI into public schools Broadcom is betting big on ethernet to disrupt AI workloads and data centers This startup wants to reprogram the mind of AIand just got $50 million to do it Want exclusive reporting and trend analysis on technology, business innovation, future of work, and design? Sign up for Fast Company Premium.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||