Amazon invests in robotic recycling company
Amazon continues to financially back companies that develop technologies promoting sustainability.
Initially announced in June 2020 with funding of $2 billion, the Amazon Climate Pledge Fund is designed to enable Amazon and other companies to meet The Climate Pledge, a commitment to be net-zero carbon by 2040.
The fund is intended to back visionary companies whose products and services will facilitate the transition to a zero-carbon economy. Its latest investment is in Glacier, company that uses AI-powered robots to automate the sorting of recyclables and collect real-time data on recycling streams for recycling companies and consumer brands.
Glacier’s proprietary AI model is capable of identifying more than 30 categories of recyclable materials in real time, as broad as PET plastic and as narrow as a toothpaste tube. The company created a custom-built robot designed for recycling sorting.
One Glacier robot at a materials recovery facility where commodities are sorted for recycling can prevent over 10 million items per year from ending up in landfills, according to the company. Novamont, Natur-Tec and Climate Pledge signatory PepsiCo are also collaborating with Amazon on this project.
Co-founded and led by Rebecca Hu and Areeb Malik, Glacier is part of Amazon’s $53 million Female Founder Initiative launched in 2022 to close the funding gap for women in climate tech. Glacier is the second company led by a female CEO to receive investment from The Climate Pledge Fund.
In the near term, Amazon says Glacier’s technology can help improve the quality of recycled content so that more post-consumer material is available for use in new packaging. Longer term, it can also enable recycling for more types of packaging and materials than are not currently recycled.
"Nearly 70 million tons of recycling are processed annually in the U.S. alone. This is already an immense undertaking, but we can recover so much more material by building accessible automation processes and then scaling it across our country’s recycling infrastructure," said Malik in an Amazon corporate blog post. "That’s what Glacier is doing.” Glacier’s robots improve sorting and recycling rates to help prevent valuable materials like metals and plastics from ending up in landfills and oceans."
Amazon announced its first five Climate Pledge Fund investments in September 2020 and began funding sustainable agriculture company Hippo Harvest in December 2021, launching its first line of leafy green lettuces in February 2023.