Amp, Waste Connections break ground on MRF project

Amp and Waste Connections have broken ground on a recycling plant in Commerce City, Colorado, that will feature an Amp One system, which offers fully automated, facility-scale sorting solutions integrating Amp sorting technology powered by artificial intelligence, or AI.  

The company introduced Amp One in early 2024, which consists of a set of tools the company can apply to greenfield projects to provide “a high certainty that recovery rates are optimized,” Amp founder and Chief Technology Officer Matanya Horowitz told Recycling Today at that time.

Later that year, Denver-based Amp and Waste Connections entered into an agreement to equip and operate the Toronto-based company’s greenfield recycling facility in Commerce City, Colorado, featuring an Amp One system and leveraging Amp Smart Sortation to optimize processing up to 62,000 tons of single-stream recyclables annually. Through AmpSmart Sortation, Amp will operate and maintain the system, which enables the automated sorting of single-stream recyclables, extracting targeted commodities and producing custom feedstock blends.

When it opens in 2026, Amp says the greenfield facility will deliver high recovery rates, process certain material streams autonomously and improve its throughput capacity over time with regular software updates.

Once operational, the plant will require minimal human intervention by using Amp’s AI technology to continuously fine tune itself, identify jams, monitor purity and adapt to changes on the line, Amp says, adding that AI integration at the facility level ensures smoother operations and higher recovery rates at scale.

Amp will operate and maintain the system under a pay-per-ton agreement with Waste Connections that includes performance guarantees. By assuming accountability for performance, Amp says it enables Waste Connections to redirect capital and attention where it matters most while also benefiting from lower operating costs, higher diversion rates, purer material streams, more accurate data and more predictable outcomes. 

This Commerce City MRF extends the companies’ partnership that began in 2020, when 24 of Amp’s AI-guided robotics systems were deployed across Waste Connections’ MRFs on container, fiber and residue lines. In 2022, the companies expanded their partnership, with Waste Connections’ deployment of more than 50 of Amp’s systems.