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- [00:01]
SailPoint Narrator
Security tools miss what matters identity. SailPoint unifies identity, security and data by detecting threats in motion and responding in real time. Transform risk into resilience. Welcome to the new era of adaptive identity driven by Sailpoint.
- [00:19]
Isabelle Busquet
Welcome to Tech News briefing. It's Tuesday, January 13th. I'm Isabelle Busquet for the Wall Street Journal. The Trump administration has slashed subsidies for solar and renewable energy, but in many segments of the market, solar deals are persisting. We're shedding light on why then. AI is everywhere these days, including recycling plants. It turns out some new tech is pretty good at sorting through streams of garbage. We'll dive into how it works and the valuable treasures it's plucking out of the TR. First solar projects have been under fire recently. The Trump administration has slashed incentives for renewable power and called the sun and wind powered energy the scam of the century. But despite that, the sun is still shining on some solar deals. Some companies are still betting on solar energy, which can sometimes be faster and cheaper to get up and running than natural gas sites. What does it mean for where the renewables industry is headed? WSJ sustainability reporter Clara Hudson joins us now to break it down. So what kinds of companies and industries are investing in renewable energy and making these deals?
- [01:39]
Clara Hudson
It's really interesting because the outlook for the solar industry is maybe a lot more complex than you might think. So the Trump administration has criticized it and cut subsidies. But then it seems like big business still thinks this is an energy source that they need to be investing in, and that is in part because it's relatively inexpensive and quick to get up and running.
- [02:07]
Isabelle Busquet
So what kinds of companies and industries are investing in renewable energy and making these deals?
- [02:13]
Clara Hudson
Essentially, any company that has a pledge to use lower carbon energy sources might consider solar. So there are definitely environmental reasons. But it's also important for a business to diversify where it's going to get its energy from and to have a mix of sources in terms of which companies in particular are investing in solar. Big tech companies like Meta and Google made some solar announcements last year, but even in the fashion industry Tapestry, which owns Coach and Kate Spade, just made an announcement about some solar project developments too.
- [02:56]
Isabelle Busquet
So you talk about the tech industry and I'm curious, how big a role is the AI boom and the need to secure energy for data centers playing in driving some of these business to solar companies?
- [03:10]
Clara Hudson
It's a really big part of the picture. So tech companies in particular need to have a broader energy strategy for how they're going to power the growing demands of AI and They really need everything that they can get, including solar. And this is a really developing area at the moment. So Google has even said that it's planning to use solar power from satellites in space to power AI in the future.
- [03:41]
Isabelle Busquet
That is. That is really interesting. So it seems like there's a lot of business that is happening here, but have the Trump policies slash incentives hurt the industry at all?
- [03:51]
Clara Hudson
Yeah, the industry has definitely been rocky, and I think the rhetoric around solar is that it's a tough industry to navigate right now, and some companies have really been struggling, some have filed for a bankruptcy or announced that they're shutting down, and they're pointing to the new policy environment in the US as the reason for that.
- [04:13]
Isabelle Busquet
So what is the future of Solar in the U.S. what should we expect to see this year?
- [04:18]
Clara Hudson
I suppose we'll have to see how it develops because the headwinds that solar is facing really depend on the Trump administration. So who knows how that might unfold this year. And it's clearly not great to be an industry that the President has criticized or isn't really backing. But overall, there are still lots of bright spots for solar in the long term because some of the biggest companies in the country are working to make that happen.
- [04:51]
Isabelle Busquet
That was WSJ sustainability reporter Clara Hudson. What do you think about the future of solar? If you're a listener on Spotify, be sure to leave us a comment. Coming up, facilities across the US Are using AI to get more efficient at looking through trash. How exactly does it work? That's after the break.
- [05:17]
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- [05:38]
Isabelle Busquet
One man's trash is another man's treasure. And increasingly, that decision is being made by artificial intelligence. Recycling centers across the US Are turning to AI to fill the messy and difficult job of sorting through recyclables. The technological shift is coming at a good time, since tariffs on aluminum have made scrap metal more valuable than ever. WSJ commodities reporter Ryan December spoke with our host Patrick Coffey to talk about how it's all going down.
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Patrick Coffey
So, Ryan, how is AI being used to sort recyclables?
- [06:15]
Ryan December
America's recycling sorting facilities are undergoing a pretty significant technological revolution thanks to AI. And what is happening with AI is it's sort of replacing a lot of the humans that would stand over these conveyor belts and have to, like, grab all the beer cans or the cardboard boxes or whatever they're trying to sort. The AI is taking over as sort of a brain. It watches everything. They put these boxes over the conveyor belts that watch every item and they instantly recognize what it is, if it's food grade material, how much the market price of it might be in the commodities markets to resell this stuff. Some of these even calculate like the center of gravity for each piece of recycling that you throw away so that a robotic claw or something could grab it down the line. It's like a really remarkable thing and it's taking one of probably the least desirable jobs in the country away.
- [07:11]
Patrick Coffey
So are we primarily talking about items that Americans have placed in our color coded recycling bins, or is this really applied to all of our trash?
- [07:19]
Ryan December
Well, it's sort of being applied to all the trash. And the reason, you know, a lot of these facilities just take the recycling, right, Single stream recycling where you don't really separate your cans from your plastic bottles from your cardboard boxes. You but all goes into like one bag or two bags that all gets taken to something called a material recovery facility or a mrf. And those are all over the country. And that's sort of the standard way to do it, is sort through. Once humans have at home separated what they think is recyclable and what's not. Now basically, humans are really bad. Americans in particular are really bad at recycling. We have bad recycling habits. We usually don't really know what's desirable, what's recyclable. And so it's a mess. And a lot of the really valuable stuff goes into the trash. So these companies are starting to come back to the idea that maybe we just throw it all in one trash bag and then they sort it, let the computers do the work. One big reason for not sorting through trash to get aluminum cans out, for example, is it's gross and unhealthy. And you shouldn't expect people to have to do that. If it's robots controlling machines, they don't care how disgusting it is.
- [08:27]
Patrick Coffey
One element of your reporting that fascinated me was about how many processing facilities now use puffs of air rather than like robots with claws to separate materials. Can you explain how that works?
- [08:40]
Ryan December
Yeah. So the big sort of breakthrough in recent years has been combining the AI that can identify things instantly and tell machines what they should grab with basically little air jets. And they will be at the end of a conveyor belt or in a big box and the material goes in and the computer will basically tell it we Want that? That's a piece of newsprint. Puff it, and it'll send all the newsprint one way and everything else that's on the line goes the other way or drops down. It kind of looks like chaos when you watch it. But in the end, they're getting much more pure and clean bales of material. And theirs have a better market price and are more useful to people to reuse.
- [09:22]
Patrick Coffey
So we think of this very low value, obviously. What are some of the most valuable treasures that these AI driven bots are picking out of our trash?
- [09:31]
Ryan December
Yeah, so that changes over time. You know, the market for aluminum is really high. When President Trump put a 50% tariff on imported aluminum, that put a premium on the aluminum we already have in the country. Think beer cans, construction debris. So grabbing that stuff that we already have. And aluminum is one of these things that's infinitely recyclable. Once you make it, you have it forever as long as you don't bury it in a landfill. So that's a product that's got an improved market. You also have cardboard boxes, more and more paper mills that produce the cardboard material. A lot of the virgin mills which use tree pulp pine, mostly in the south, they've been shutting down and that's put box makers more reliant on ever than in getting that old cardboard back to make new boxes. So that's a market that's pretty robust. Plastics, we all have questions about plastics recycling and the track record's pretty poor. And we've all heard these stories about, well, your stuff really just ends up in the landfill or we send it to some other country. With the advent of what are called extended producer responsibility laws, big companies, like companies that make soft drinks or like shampoo bottles and detergent bottles, have incentive to get their products back to get ahead of these laws that are meant to curb plastic pollution. So there's a lot of push into better sorting Pl and this technology is being put to use to that end so that we can be better at sending the Tide detergent bottles back to become new Tide bottles.
- [11:02]
Isabelle Busquet
That was WSJ commodities reporter Ryan December and Tech News Briefing host Patrick Coffey. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. If you're a listener on Spotify, be sure to leave us a comment. Today's show was produced by Anthony Bansi and Julie Chang with supervising producer Katie Ferguson. I'm Isabel Bousquet for the Wall Street Journal. We'll be back later this morning with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.
- [11:35]
SailPoint Narrator
Security tools. Ms. What matters. Identity. They can't see who is accessing what, when, where, why, or at what risk level until it's too late. Sailpoint Adaptive identity unifies identity security and data detecting threats in motion and responding in real time. Because static security can't protect a dynamic enterprise, see what others can't Stop threats before they spread. Transform risk into resilience. Welcome to the new era of adaptive identity driven by Sailpoint.