(COLORADO SPRINGS) — A local recycling center in Colorado Springs is using a robot to help sort waste items.

It is becoming more common to recycle, but it can be hard to understand how to properly sort materials. Republic Services’ main responsibility for the city is to do that sorting.

“Its main job is to sort. So right now it’s picking out number one and number twos-aluminum and milk cartons,” said Thomas Brackett, the Recycle Facility Maintenance Lead Tech.

It’s the biggest recycling facility in Colorado Springs, and their job is to organize. With more than 1,000 tons of materials to sort every day, the company is using a new robot to help.

“It’s helped a lot because it’s taking up a lot of extremist material that we could have just been losing out on in the stream,” said Brackett.

The robot is called the AMP Cortex, and it uses a vision system and vacuum tube to recognize different materials before it decides how to pick through it all.

“It’s efficiency is 80 picks per minute. It helps us because that’s twice as fast as a human,” said Brackett.

All of the waste needs to be sorted before it can get sent off to other facilities, which then convert it into new products. Brackett said the recycling industry is looking to AI to improve the quality of recycled goods.

“It helps build up in better quality control and it’s much better for getting a better sustainability,” he said.

The company said it only finds about eight percent of unrecyclable materials in the facility.

To find out whether something can be recycled, check your city’s local recycling procedures.