The developers of a dexterous robot that breaks down electronic waste believe it could at least double the lifecycle of hard-to-reuse components and perhaps lead to better pay for reskilled workers from high-turnover e-waste recycling facilities.
Rob Lawson-Shanks, who co-founded the startup Molg with Mark Lyons, told Fast Company that he was inspired to find a solution to the growing problem of e-waste after 10 years of working as a designer of consumer electronics, most of which ended up in landfills.
According to the World Health Organization, less than 23% of the 68.3 million tons of e-waste was formally collected and recycled in 2022, and informal salvaging, dumping, or storage often allows toxic heavy metals like lead to go into the environment.
"I started to realize I was contributing to this massive, 60-million-ton problem of e-waste because of how we were designing, manufacturing, and ultimately not recovering [products]," Lawson-Shanks explained to Fast Company.
Companies such as Best Buy, Staples, and more now have programs to help shoppers recycle their old electronics, and Fast Company noted Apple has created a robot to recycle iPhones. However, Molg's system goes one step further, with its focus on reuse rather than recycling.
"We are seeing cases where I think 100% reuse is absolutely achievable, where you can get something that typically maybe has like a three-year lifecycle, and you might be able to extend that all the way to six to nine years of use," Lawson-Shanks told Fast Company.
According to Molg's website, this is made possible in part by the autonomous robot's "high-precision technology" that maximizes the components' reuse potential.
"[We] really care about what we're touching and then moving so that we can retest, re-qualify, and redeploy," Lawson-Shanks told Fast Company. "Ultimately, it's to try and keep things at the highest value possible."
While skeptics might note that Molg's robotic "microfactories" will need maintenance or else become a new form of e-waste, Lawson-Shanks added in his interview that e-waste recycling facility workers — who often leave their posts after several months — could receive higher wages for learning to keep the system running smoothly.
Molg is now in the process of scaling up — something the company says it can quickly do in existing e-waste recycling facilities. According to the report, a seed round of funding brought in $5.5 million from investors such as Closed Loop Partners' Ventures Group, Overture, Techstars, ABB, Elemental Impact, and Amazon Climate Pledge Fund.
It is also partnering with Dell and HP to develop products that its robots can disassemble with more ease, such as laptops that don't require glues and screws.
"Ideally, everything would be designed with circularity and automation in mind," Lawson-Shanks told Fast Company.
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