How this Toronto airport is using AI to help reduce garbage waste
Billy Bishop is the 1st Toronto airport to launch the recycling tool
A Toronto airport is using artificial intelligence to help reduce garbage waste and teach people about recycling.
Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport launched its first Oscar Sort recycling stations on Wednesday to guide travelers on how to dispose of their waste properly across terminals.
Alex Rector is the global Oscar lead at Intuitive AI, the Canadian technology company that created Oscar Sort. He says the goal with the recycling tool is to make sure items end up in the correct disposal streams.
"We find a lot of people have walked up to a bin and just don't know where things are supposed to end up, and that's again where Oscar becomes the hero across five continents. We're diverting waste away from landfill," he said.
The Oscar station looks like a standard recycling system, but it contains a scanner that identifies the item that someone wants to discard, then nudges the person to deposit their garbage or recyclables in the right bin.
Founded in 2017, Oscar has caught up with the new types of AI in the market by increasing its processors to identify items faster and improve its pixels, Rector says. The AI recycling assistant also features recycling trivia for adults and kids.
This is the first launch of Oscar Sort at any Toronto airport, and Billy Bishop will have four recycling stations. Rector says the airport is the perfect place to have the system.
"If you think about an airport, you have folks traveling from all over the world, and recycling might be different in different areas, or there might be a language barrier," said Rector.
Oscar has a 92 per cent accuracy rate, Rector says.
"A lot of the time, folks will walk up to Oscar and show an item, and they'll be so astounded that Oscar knows what they're holding and where to throw it out, and so the next thing they're going to do is try and trick Oscar," he said.
'Gamifying ... waste management'
The vice president of communications and public affairs at PortsToronto, the transportation service that owns and operates Billy Bishop, says this is a great use of AI.
"We all love to be entertained, and we all love to have our attention grabbed quickly," said Deborah Wilson. "It's a simple technology, you're gamifying something like waste management, and I think it will really have an impact in terms of people's behaviour."
Juhi Matta, the senior manager for environment, social, and governance at PortsToronto, says she's happy Billy Bishop is getting the new tool.
"When we learned about Oscar Sort, we thought it would be a fun way to not only reduce contamination and increase the waste diverted from landfill, but it would also be a great opportunity to engage passengers," she said.
She says Oscar will also be a good way to improve recycling rates in general.
"Tools like this make something as mundane as recycling more fun, and we're hoping that it becomes, for lack of a better word, more intuitive for people to deal with this," said Matta.
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With files from Mercedes Gaztambide