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I would love to work on something similar for sorting plastics for recycling. I wish there was an organization like Uber for organizing groups to do this in eve

I would love to work on something similar for sorting plastics for recycling. I wish there was an organization like Uber for organizing groups to do this in every city, along with finding funding to pay developers (> $100/developer_day). I would devote considerable effort to this full time if there are any angels out there or people who know anyone that could raise funds. Also, does anyone know of a group working to improve the recycling symbol? It's too small/shallow to even be read by humans, much less machines, on many plastic containers. Short of that, we could break down the task into 1) isolating the symbol on the container and 2) reading the symbol maybe with extra wavelengths like infrared/ultraviolet or their combination with visible light. Here in Boise, we have regular recycling that only accepts types 1 and 2, then they make participants sort 4, 5, 6, and 7 into an orange bag that gets sent to Nevada to be turned into diesel fuel. I see a ton of recycling in the trash because people aren't motivated to sort it manually: EDIT: Added JPG: https://imgur.com/a/puSmAzO https://imgur.com/a/puSmAzO PDF (old): https://www.cityofboise.org/media/1632/detailedplasticsguide-7-2018.pdf https://www.cityofboise.org/media/1632/detailedplasticsguide...

bargl 7y ago
I have thought about this a bit. It would be awesome if there was a camera next to the recycling bin that could recognize the container and give advice on what to do with the material and any rules on it. Such as cardboard can be recycled if it's clean but composted if it has any grease. Some places don't have compost so there it'd say to put it in the trash. It would be nice just to know what to do with specific materials rather than guessing half the time.
- zackmorris 7y ago
  Oh that's a good idea. I was thinking that there should be an open source object recognizer that can sort any material (kind of like a 3D printer). But having cameras on recycle bins would be great. Used cell phones could do it. There are probably unlimited amounts available for $5-10 each: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=lot+cell+phone https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=lot+cell+phone Also image recognition has been a solved problem since about 2010, so any roughly 1 GHz processor can do it in under a second for something like a plastics recycling symbol. I just can't believe that there is no money available for projects like these. I was thinking about it just now at the gym and I'd like to see society move away from donating time at a personal level, and towards organizational donating where the workers involved are paid the going rate on their labor. So instead of working a full-time job and being expected to put in a couple nights and weekends per month on volunteering, we'd instead donate money to foundations that could go deep on problems with real backing. It seems to me that this would also be a good fit with open source in general. These problems are so much easier than the yak shaving we do at work that we could solve most of them in a matter of a year or two.

bargl 7y ago

I have thought about this a bit. It would be awesome if there was a camera next to the recycling bin that could recognize the container and give advice on what to do with the material and any rules on it. Such as cardboard can be recycled if it's clean but composted if it has any grease. Some places don't have compost so there it'd say to put it in the trash. It would be nice just to know what to do with specific materials rather than guessing half the time.

zackmorris 7y ago
Oh that's a good idea. I was thinking that there should be an open source object recognizer that can sort any material (kind of like a 3D printer). But having cameras on recycle bins would be great. Used cell phones could do it. There are probably unlimited amounts available for $5-10 each: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=lot+cell+phone https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=lot+cell+phone Also image recognition has been a solved problem since about 2010, so any roughly 1 GHz processor can do it in under a second for something like a plastics recycling symbol. I just can't believe that there is no money available for projects like these. I was thinking about it just now at the gym and I'd like to see society move away from donating time at a personal level, and towards organizational donating where the workers involved are paid the going rate on their labor. So instead of working a full-time job and being expected to put in a couple nights and weekends per month on volunteering, we'd instead donate money to foundations that could go deep on problems with real backing. It seems to me that this would also be a good fit with open source in general. These problems are so much easier than the yak shaving we do at work that we could solve most of them in a matter of a year or two.