A. Automated recycle machines(ARM)

What is ARM?: It is a toilet sized recycling station that can be found in Switzerland, German, Taiwan, etc.

How to uses them?: People can recycle their materials such as drinks’ cans, bottles, foods’ wrapping, etc, by first putting their material to a scanner, and then, insert their materials into a collection box on ARM one by one.

How does it work?: The system inside ARM stores the metadata of registered materials. The scanner inside scans the barcode materials printed on during manufacture time. The system identifies the type of material and opens the corresponding collection box for users to insert in.

What are the weaknesses over the Earth ARMour?:
• recycling only limited to registered products
• long material collection time due to waiting time required for scanning and inserting

B. Large-scale automated recycle machine: ZenRobotics

What is it ZenRobotics?: It is a large scale factory for waster classification and management developed in German.

How to use it?: Waste are transported to ZenRobotics stations’ conveyor belt to be classified.

How does it work?: Computerized technology similar to the Earth ARMour is implemented to classify factory waste. Items are picked up and relocated from the conveyor belt to collection area.

What are the weaknesses over the Earth ARMour?:
• very inaccessible
• geographical constraint
• unnecessary transportation cost required for delivering waste from city collection box, and later to recycling places