AI-Powered Contamination Detection

Municipalities have always known recycling contamination is a problem. They just had no way to see it at the source.

Prairie Robotics puts AI-powered cameras on collection trucks. The instant a bin is emptied into the hopper, the system captures images, classifies the contaminants, and matches the incident to a specific household using high-precision GPS. Three proprietary computer-vision models, trained on large in-house datasets of waste-hopper imagery and bin serial codes, deliver 99%+ accuracy, fully automating audits that used to be manual and could only ever sample a fraction of households a year.

This is deliberately a different kind of AI. Where most products wrap a frontier model in a purpose-built harness, contamination detection is a set of custom-trained vision models, because that is what the problem demands.

The result is a closed loop. Detection feeds Recycle Coach, another Quadshift company, which notifies the exact household through its app so the behavior actually changes: from detection to correction, fully automated. The platform now runs in cities across North America, with the next generation of the vision stack already in development.