The Accuracy of Sorting Beverage Cans and Bottles for a Reverse Vending Machine

Abstract

At present, there are many types of beverage packages such as cans and plastic bottles which lead to a large number of waste beverage cans. Furthermore, throwing beverage cans away without management tends to be an ineffective way to get optimal utilization of resources. Hence, the primary emphasis of this work is on the development of automatic sorting of beverage cans for reverse vending machines. In addition, the accuracy testing of sorting beverage cans by the machine was designed based on three techniques which are easy to implement and which will bring sustainable energy innovations with communities’ participation. There are two sampling groups of cans and plastic bottles in the experimental studies. The first group is the group which already has data in the system for using this in a prototype of sorting process. The latter one is the group without data in the system or which has never been used before.
 Furthermore, the reverse vending machine has two types of proximity sensors; inductive and capacitive which work together. The experimental results of sorting beverage cans and bottles on two sample groups show that the average accuracy of sorting is 99.20%. The sorting of beverage cans and bottles based on magnetic hinge and barcode provides an average accuracy of 79.20% and 50.00%, respectively. Classifying using the proximity sensor has the fastest operation with an average of 2.66 seconds, followed by barcode and hinge. Those takes 4.01 and 5.21 seconds, respectively.

Feasibility of Reverse Vending Machine for PET Bottle Recycling in Case of ABC Hypermarket

“…In Thailand, RVMs were first introduced in 2012 [25]. The use of RVMs has gradually grown and become more popular lately [26]. Innovative Thai companies have implemented several RVMs including Circular One (Sustaintech and Tencent Cloud), P'Pet (Thana Steel Work Co., Ltd.), and Refun Machine (Refun Co., Ltd.).…”

“…Innovative Thai companies have implemented several RVMs including Circular One (Sustaintech and Tencent Cloud), P'Pet (Thana Steel Work Co., Ltd.), and Refun Machine (Refun Co., Ltd.). RVMs can be found in some office buildings and commercial stores nowadays [26].…”

“…RVMs have been installed at bus stops, hospitals, offices, railway stations, shopping malls, schools, subways, supermarkets, universities, etc. [26,27,30,34,35]. RVMs reduce the needs of staff and save time and energy.…”

“…RVMs are also used in some other countries such as Bangladesh, China, Dubai, India, Indonesia, Greece, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Philippines, Russia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Turkey [26,30,35,[38][39][40]. Nowadays, there are over 100,000 RVMs that have been installed throughout the world.…”

“…The study found that approximately 21% more PET bottles were collected when the RVM was installed in the study area compared to Business as Usual (BAU) waste collection in the area [41]. Watanyulertsakul et al [26] designed an automatic RVM for deposition of PET bottles and aluminum cans in 2019. RVMs now can be found in some office buildings and commercial stores such as Central, Emquartier, Lotus, Siam and The Mall.…”