3 ms·

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

by 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.

3 ms·

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

by bargl 7y ago

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.