Grant: Applied Research and Development Grants - Level 1

eCycle Solutions operates multiple asset recovery and electronics and electrical equipment recycling facilities*across Canada. eCycle Solutions is privately held, Canadian owned with over 400 employees and 300 metric*tonnes of daily processing capacity, with over 350,000 sq/ft of warehousing and processing space across all sites.*Traditionally, at Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) recycling facilities, outdated waste electronics*are shredded in order to liberate their materials. The objective is to then separate these shredded pieces based*on their material type to produce pure commodities. To accomplish this, a variety of sorting technologies are used*to separate these materials, however, contamination is prevalent due to inefficiencies in these technologies. To*address this contamination, workers manually remove pieces from the material stream. This process is labourintensive,*time-consuming, monotonous, repetitive, and not cost effective.*Conestogas proposed solution for this project is to develop a pick-n-place robot as a mechanical picker, which*is capable of sorting shredded waste electronics utilizing a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The CNN will*""train"" the robot so that it will mimic the capability of the human operator and ""learn"" based on experience. This*will result in increased purity rates and processing speeds, and will enable much of the labour force to deployed to*other tasks, which will lead to reduced processing costs, and increased profitability.