Robot Helps With Tedious Job Of Sorting Plastic For Recycling

While everybody is trying to go green and get into the whole recycling trend, having to sort through the plastics in the pre-recycle sort isn’t exactly fun or easy. Factor in the deal that the recycle numbers stamped on most plastic containers don’t accurately indicate whether they can be recycled together or not, and you’ve got one troublesome process. Fortunately, the folks over at Mitsubishi Electric Engineering Corp and Osaka University are busy trying to solve the problem, with robots. Said robot will be able to utilize five lasers of different wavelengths to determine the reflectivity index, and therefore the composition of the plastics, allowing them to be separated via automation, rather than getting a human being to do it. There isn’t any mention of how much plastic this machine can sort through on a daily basis, but we hope that it’ll be a lot faster than getting human beings to sort through it. You’ll need to shell out about $55,000 to get one of these robots, though. It’s good to see that we’re moving forward towards a greener future.