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I think it might be easier to just have machines learn to recognize the top 99.9% of all things thrown away and leave the rest to a a small group (or landfill).
by lallysingh 6y ago
I think it might be easier to just have machines learn to recognize the top 99.9% of all things thrown away and leave the rest to a a small group (or landfill).
- londons_explore 6y agoThis seems like the obvious solution. I bet a database of 100,000 products would cover the vast majority of all waste worldwide. If you can make a machine to sort those things into 100,000 (virtual) piles, you can then have a specific way to handle each type of thing. Each manufacturer of those goods can decide how to handle their "pile", and if they design for recyclability, it's going to be easier and cheaper for them. If they can just say "combine our product with these other products made from the same material" that'll work out cheapest. If their answer is "our product contains a mix of various toxic stuff" then they're going to have to pay for some specialist to handle it... In every location this 'pile' exists in every city... The only place this system doesn't work is for products that change state significantly during consumer use - for example a candle gets mostly burnt away, but the remaining blobs of wax are probably untracable to the original manufacturer.
- baybal2 6y agoThe problem, as I stated above, is that you will be landfilling significantly more than 0.01%. There are tons of unrecyclable stuff in regular household garbage. For example, a packaging made of two incompatible in recycling methods plastics are a waste.
- lallysingh 6y agoI'm describing an approach to sorting. Your response isn't about sorting.