21–30 of 74 posts
What I find sad is to see startups here in Switzerland where we already separate and recycle extensively that offer a service where you just toss everything that can be recycled in the same bag. So batteries are mixed with plastic and cans. These bags compete with government collection facilities and are "reprogramming" people to be lazy. Regular trash is very expensive here and people who want to safe are forced to…
I wish articles like this would just get to the point. We don't need yet another explanation of how recycling works, how it has low recovery rates, etc. Given the audience, take it as a given the reader has the basics down. Further down the author finally starts to talk about their topic (trash picking robots), but then digresses yet again. It's a really terrible writing style. State what your topic is up front with…
[14 paragraphs of crap]
Ingredients list.
Recipe.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!
A friend of mine worked at this company, and the bane of his existence was one popular Arizona green tea bottle. The plastic and glass versions looked identical[1], so no way to sort it visually. Great for brand identity, bad downstream. [1] https://www.plasticstoday.com/packaging/arizona-beverages-sw...
Seems like we need similar legislation as tobacco packaging. Dedicate 40-60% of product to machine readable identification of what type of recycling it is.
Before we tried to use AI and cameras for this task, bottle-return machines have just used barcode scanners. They're fast, deadly accurate, and take zero intelligence to program. The achilles' heel is certain jerkface brands that use white-ink-on-shiny-aluminum, which violates the contrast requirements of many scanners. For those, image recognition would be a valuable second method.
What I find sad is to see startups here in Switzerland where we already separate and recycle extensively that offer a service where you just toss everything that can be recycled in the same bag. So batteries are mixed with plastic and cans. These bags compete with government collection facilities and are "reprogramming" people to be lazy. Regular trash is very expensive here and people who want to safe are forced to…
Centralizing this does not scale . Sure it does.[1] What doesn't scale is manual sorting. It complicates collection, because there are all those bins to empty,the trucks are more complicated, and humans aren't good at separating the different types of plastics. That's easy with multispectral imaging, but humans lack that capability. Bulk Handling Systems seems to be the US leader in this. Robots are used but do under…
My favorite thing about some of these sorting systems is that they are online but not instantaneous. For any reasonable rate of objects passing by the scanner, they can determine yes/no (or maybe/no) in a fixed amount of time, say 10ms for illustration purposes. So the picker is 10ms down the conveyor from the sensor, and the signal arrives at the precise moment to activate the picker. More computers or faster computers let you increase the flow rate by increasing either the density or the speed of the conveyor, but it's always a realtime system.
For instance I don't think that lead aluminum alloys care too much if you get a little bit of soda can mixed in, but I sure care if you put lead alloy in my window screens or into my aluminum can (although the lining protects a lot of the can, it doesn't protect the lip or your sweaty hands, or the PR nightmare of discovering lead in the cans).
What I find sad is to see startups here in Switzerland where we already separate and recycle extensively that offer a service where you just toss everything that can be recycled in the same bag. So batteries are mixed with plastic and cans. These bags compete with government collection facilities and are "reprogramming" people to be lazy. Regular trash is very expensive here and people who want to safe are forced to…
The consumer sorting is often not very good and requires multiple bins with a higher capital and operating cost for storage and collection. It's a pain for the users. Single stream trash is the way to go with robotic sorting is the way to go. No reason it can't scale. Amazing work, one of the best uses of labeling and machine vision I've seen to date.
Excellent human sorting as you find in Japan or Switzerland is rare. Of course it is desirable. Pre-sorted inputs are not perfect in those jurisdictions, and rare in most other places.
The comment above lauds the technology here and I agree. Sorting a recycling line is a terrible kind of job for the majority of adults, and economics make the implementation worse in many cases. De-facto, it is the handicapped, children, prisoners and starving people that sort trash in most of the world. 1st world machinery with the right economics are an improvement in almost all cases, especially where food waste might be involved.
GOOD Point by my wife! Why can’t we have a blower on a belt to accomplish most of the sorting? Plastics blow one way and glass stays on the belt. Throw in a magnet and make eddy currents to trap metals.
When I was a child I saw one system that expected all aluminum that just used an electromagnet to lift any steel out of the stream. That was quite a ways up in the air so I suspect the owner would have gotten pretty pissed if we threw a bunch of nails or soup cans in the bag for fun. But most of the other ones I've seen have two conveyors with a gap, and they use an AC magnet to fling the aluminum onto the second conveyor (via eddy currents). Most of the ferrous stuff just drops into the first bin, or funnels off to be sorted again.
For your plastic or glass suggestion, that may take breaking it up first, since large items might not lift or go in weird directions. And then some plastics are pretty dense. I have the vaguest notion that I might have seen a system that sorts plastic from glass while washing it, since the glass sinks and some plastics don't, but that could have been a prototype or a misfiring neuron for all I can remember.
What I find sad is to see startups here in Switzerland where we already separate and recycle extensively that offer a service where you just toss everything that can be recycled in the same bag. So batteries are mixed with plastic and cans. These bags compete with government collection facilities and are "reprogramming" people to be lazy. Regular trash is very expensive here and people who want to safe are forced to…
GOOD Point by my wife! Why can’t we have a blower on a belt to accomplish most of the sorting? Plastics blow one way and glass stays on the belt. Throw in a magnet and make eddy currents to trap metals.
What I find sad is to see startups here in Switzerland where we already separate and recycle extensively that offer a service where you just toss everything that can be recycled in the same bag. So batteries are mixed with plastic and cans. These bags compete with government collection facilities and are "reprogramming" people to be lazy. Regular trash is very expensive here and people who want to safe are forced to…
Airbnb guests mean that separating recyclable items at the home doesn't work, you just end up with some incorrect stuff in every recycling bin.