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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 tha

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 separate and recycle what can be. The hardest task of recycling is the separation of items. Centralizing this does not scale as you need to hire more and more underpaid worked to do this task. The task that was done for free before by the person throwing the item out. All the facilities had to do is sort the remaining small percentage of miss sorted items instead of all items.

quotemstr 4y ago
Does sorting done by the general public count as "free"? It takes time and effort to route garbage to the appropriate bin --- maybe not much, but it adds up over the whole population. The desire to avoid this effort doesn't strike me as "lazy" any more than hiring a housekeeper or landscaper is "lazy". Economies of scale and division of labor make our society more prosperous. Why shouldn't we apply these principles to trash disposal and recycling?
- sschueller 4y ago
  It does not scale (at least not yet with current AI). It does cost everyone a bit of time but it also depends on you and how much trash you generate. Recycling is for the benefit of all of us and we should all do our part irregardless if a CEO or a house cleaner.
- losteric 4y ago
  From an efficiency perspective, it seems "cheaper" to presort each item upon ingestion rather than mixing everything up and sorting later. For most people, placing an item in the right bin is a subconscious action on "autopilot".
- lttlrck 4y ago
  It's not noticeably more difficult to drop an item in 1 of 4 bins vs 1 - and it reduces spoilage.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  mixing items causes contamination, that is rgen harder to separate.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gloriana 4y ago
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.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  I have experience in commercial recycling and was about to post something with dim details, but this comment says what I was about to say roughly. It is hard to read comments from people with good intentions but zero experience in commercial recycling. Single-stream versus household sort is one of the most basic choices of any municipal recycling program. Every operation has waste, flaws and mistakes, single stream or not. 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.
  - jamal-kumar 4y ago
    I'm wondering what happens to the woman who collects bottles in my neighborhood for her son's wheelchair when this technology comes to the third world. That said the local garbage dump is encroaching on a refugee settlement, if it was something that could help it encroach less on that maybe it's a good thing. Lots of factors here.
- PakG1 4y ago
  It's not necessarily a pain for the users. It's a cultural thing. If you can change the culture, it's easy to do it with humans at the source. I'm in South Korea now and they sort all the garbage before even throwing it out. Different bins for different types of plastic, styrofoam, tetra pak containers, cardboard, glass, organic waste, etc. My brother-in-law, his kids, and I will take the garbage down and put it all into the right bin. No complaining, everyone thinks it's the proper thing to do. Makes it super easy to process each type of garbage correctly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling_in_South_Korea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling_in_South_Korea South Korea didn't do it this way in the beginning. When I was in China a couple of years ago, they were just starting to process their garbage this way, though it'll take a while for them to really do it well. The interesting question is why it's so hard to get the west to handle things this way. I don't know Europe, they might be better, but I know North America, and wow, the people in North America really don't care about this kind of stuff in general.
Animats 4y ago
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 10% of the job. Most of the sorting is done by screens, shakers, drums, DC and AC magnets, and air-jet optical sorters. The robots only do "quality control", pulling out stuff that the heavy machinery mis-sorted. San Francisco has one of their plants. Aluminum is easily separated and recycled, and is the only profitable part of the operation. Steel gets separated and melted down, and about 40% of US steel is now recycled. Which is why Nucor, which started as a recycler, is the biggest US steel company. Some kinds of plastic bottles recycle well, but it doesn't really pay. CarbonLite, with three big plants, went bankrupt in 2021. The buyers kept the plants running, but the investors didn't get much. CarbonLite was caught between high fixed costs and not enough market for their product. There's not much use for mixed paper. Offices used to generate large amounts of good quality paper, and newspapers were a consistent source of uniform product. But now, most paper is discarded packaging, with too much else mixed in. It's hard to make money at this. Separation, though, is not the problem. [1] https://bulkhandlingsystems.com/wp/ https://bulkhandlingsystems.com/wp/
- hinkley 4y ago
  I saw one of those how they do it shows where the host went to an aluminum recycling plant, and this is how I learned there are lead alloys out there. They use an xray machine to sort those. 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).
WheatM 4y ago
rjsw 4y ago
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.
- rch 4y ago
  I used Airbnb for years traveling to Zürich, and there were always very explicit directions about the recycling with warnings that any fines incurred would be passed along to me. I think the whole system seems fairly simple and reasonable.
  - rjsw 4y ago
    I am not the host, it isn't working in my apartment block. The UK doesn't have a single standard on how to do recycling, it is up to each town council to choose how things should be sorted as well as the type and colour of the bin for each class, someone from outside that area would not know the system without being told.

quotemstr 4y ago

Does sorting done by the general public count as "free"? It takes time and effort to route garbage to the appropriate bin --- maybe not much, but it adds up over the whole population. The desire to avoid this effort doesn't strike me as "lazy" any more than hiring a housekeeper or landscaper is "lazy". Economies of scale and division of labor make our society more prosperous. Why shouldn't we apply these principles to trash disposal and recycling?

sschueller 4y ago
It does not scale (at least not yet with current AI). It does cost everyone a bit of time but it also depends on you and how much trash you generate. Recycling is for the benefit of all of us and we should all do our part irregardless if a CEO or a house cleaner.
losteric 4y ago
From an efficiency perspective, it seems "cheaper" to presort each item upon ingestion rather than mixing everything up and sorting later. For most people, placing an item in the right bin is a subconscious action on "autopilot".
lttlrck 4y ago
It's not noticeably more difficult to drop an item in 1 of 4 bins vs 1 - and it reduces spoilage.
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
mixing items causes contamination, that is rgen harder to separate.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

gloriana 4y ago

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.

mistrial9 4y ago
I have experience in commercial recycling and was about to post something with dim details, but this comment says what I was about to say roughly. It is hard to read comments from people with good intentions but zero experience in commercial recycling. Single-stream versus household sort is one of the most basic choices of any municipal recycling program. Every operation has waste, flaws and mistakes, single stream or not. 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.
- jamal-kumar 4y ago
  I'm wondering what happens to the woman who collects bottles in my neighborhood for her son's wheelchair when this technology comes to the third world. That said the local garbage dump is encroaching on a refugee settlement, if it was something that could help it encroach less on that maybe it's a good thing. Lots of factors here.
PakG1 4y ago
It's not necessarily a pain for the users. It's a cultural thing. If you can change the culture, it's easy to do it with humans at the source. I'm in South Korea now and they sort all the garbage before even throwing it out. Different bins for different types of plastic, styrofoam, tetra pak containers, cardboard, glass, organic waste, etc. My brother-in-law, his kids, and I will take the garbage down and put it all into the right bin. No complaining, everyone thinks it's the proper thing to do. Makes it super easy to process each type of garbage correctly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling_in_South_Korea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling_in_South_Korea South Korea didn't do it this way in the beginning. When I was in China a couple of years ago, they were just starting to process their garbage this way, though it'll take a while for them to really do it well. The interesting question is why it's so hard to get the west to handle things this way. I don't know Europe, they might be better, but I know North America, and wow, the people in North America really don't care about this kind of stuff in general.

Animats 4y ago

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 10% of the job. Most of the sorting is done by screens, shakers, drums, DC and AC magnets, and air-jet optical sorters. The robots only do "quality control", pulling out stuff that the heavy machinery mis-sorted. San Francisco has one of their plants. Aluminum is easily separated and recycled, and is the only profitable part of the operation. Steel gets separated and melted down, and about 40% of US steel is now recycled. Which is why Nucor, which started as a recycler, is the biggest US steel company. Some kinds of plastic bottles recycle well, but it doesn't really pay. CarbonLite, with three big plants, went bankrupt in 2021. The buyers kept the plants running, but the investors didn't get much. CarbonLite was caught between high fixed costs and not enough market for their product. There's not much use for mixed paper. Offices used to generate large amounts of good quality paper, and newspapers were a consistent source of uniform product. But now, most paper is discarded packaging, with too much else mixed in. It's hard to make money at this. Separation, though, is not the problem. [1] https://bulkhandlingsystems.com/wp/ https://bulkhandlingsystems.com/wp/

hinkley 4y ago
I saw one of those how they do it shows where the host went to an aluminum recycling plant, and this is how I learned there are lead alloys out there. They use an xray machine to sort those. 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).

WheatM 4y ago

rjsw 4y ago

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.

rch 4y ago
I used Airbnb for years traveling to Zürich, and there were always very explicit directions about the recycling with warnings that any fines incurred would be passed along to me. I think the whole system seems fairly simple and reasonable.
- rjsw 4y ago
  I am not the host, it isn't working in my apartment block. The UK doesn't have a single standard on how to do recycling, it is up to each town council to choose how things should be sorted as well as the type and colour of the bin for each class, someone from outside that area would not know the system without being told.