Empirical Framework of Reverse Vending Machine (RVM) with Material Identification Capability to Improve Recycling

Abstract

Recycling is one of the important approaches to manage the waste effectively. Nowadays, many recycle bins were placed in school, university, shopping complex and housing area. Although most of them have good awareness to support these activities, yet there are still who abuse the usage of recycling bin by inserting prohibited items. To cater such an issue, a Reverse Vending Machine (RVM) with material identification module is proposed to accept only empty recycle items and reject the rest. The constructed system consists of rotating mechanism and collection of sensors to detect empty PET bottle and aluminum can respectively. From the experiment, it can be shown that the module capable to reject unwanted material with an average of 82.5% of accuracy. Such capability shows a promising outcome for preventing the abuse of recycling bins, and can be used to realize the RVM concept by introducing a reward to the person who recycle properly.

Development of PET bottle shredder reverse vending machine

“…The resources are being used at a very high speed exceeding the rate of these materials are being reproduced. The recorded recycling rate in Malaysia is only 10.5 per cent, which is far behind the developed countries [2]. By 2020, Malaysia has targeted to not only achieve the 22% recycling rate, but also tremendous improvement in becoming a zero waste nation.…”

Reverse Vending Machine Item Verification Module using Classification and Detection Model of CNN

“…RVM works by analyzing every deposit recycle materials to the machine and provide reward to the user accordingly. Previously, a hybrid sensing based RVM [3][4] has been developed and tested in municipal office as shown in Fig. 1.…”