Robot Knows How To Sort, Recycle Plastic

Writing by Evan Ackerman on Wednesday, 3 of March , 2010 at 5:35 am

Despite the fact that plastics are used everywhere, especially in products which are intended to be disposable, the recycling rate for plastics compared to metal, paper, and glass is utterly abysmal. It’s at like 6%, which means that 94% of potentially recyclable plastics end up in landfills or the tummies of sea turtles. The problem, as you have probably noticed, is that it’s a gigantic pain in the butt to do the obligatory pre-recycle sort with plastics. Yeah, there are recycle numbers stamped on most plastic containers, but I’ll bet you didn’t know that plastics with the same number often can’t actually be recycled together. Basically, it’s a mess.

Mitsubishi Electric Engineering Corp and Osaka University are tackling this problem with a robot, as well they should, since we humans have proven ourselves to be absolutely no good at plastic recycling. As you might expect, the the robot has some capabilities that we don’t, namely five lasers of different wavelengths that can be used to determine the reflectivity index, and therefore composition, of most plastics. The robot will automatically sort plastics into six different types, which takes the hard work of manual identification out the whole plastic recycling process.

There aren’t any details on how much plastic one of these robots can sort through every day, but there is a commercial version in the works, which should be available (at some point) for around $55k. At that price, it’s not going to be resource neutral anytime soon, but at least it will make you feel better about your recycling habits. And the sea turtles will thank you.

[ Osaka University ] VIA [ Telegraph ]

Comments (3)

Category: Eco-Friendly, Industrial

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3 Comments

Comment by Barrett Ames

Made Thursday, 4 of March , 2010 at 7:51 am

dangit another of my great ideas stolen and implemented by the japaneese…. they must be reading my mind or something.

Comment by aaron

Made Friday, 5 of March , 2010 at 10:17 am

I just found this related article on a new recycling robot. It is called the DustBot and rides around on a Segway piking up trash. Pretty cool! Now if we could just combine the two we would be set.
http://thegreenertruth.com/2010/03/recycling-robot-the-dustbot/

Comment by Hannah Hall

Made Wednesday, 28 of July , 2010 at 1:31 am

we should always think about recycling our waste products to help the environment.”";