Hacker News Reader

Comment by morcheeba | Hacker News Reader

A friend of mine worked at this company, and the bane of his existence was one popular Arizona green tea bottle. The plastic and glass versions looked identical[1], so no way to sort it visually. Great for brand identity, bad downstream.

[1] https://www.plasticstoday.com/packaging/arizona-beverages-sw...

View on HN

Did your friend eventually find a workable solution? I wonder if they could reach out to the beverage company and ask for a distinguishing feature that’s easy to recognize for computer vision but wouldn’t affect the brand’s look-and-feel for human vision. Perhaps a machine readable version of a resin identification code [1] encoded as a pattern visible from any angle?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resin_identification_code

Seems like we need similar legislation as tobacco packaging. Dedicate 40-60% of product to machine readable identification of what type of recycling it is.

Or just go Aldi's route and put enormous barcodes covering entire sides of the package. Scan rate goes up _immensely_ when you don't have to give even half a hoot about orientation.

Before we tried to use AI and cameras for this task, bottle-return machines have just used barcode scanners. They're fast, deadly accurate, and take zero intelligence to program. The achilles' heel is certain jerkface brands that use white-ink-on-shiny-aluminum, which violates the contrast requirements of many scanners. For those, image recognition would be a valuable second method.

Aldi seems to have figured out packaging the best out of ANY store I have been to. And the empty boxes for your groceries are always useful if you forget to grab a basket beforehand.

The article shows the solution to this being a glass breaker stage.

I wonder if echolocation could have done the trick

Seriously. Give that robot some more senses. Echoic, magnetic, infra-ultra, spectrographic analytic, nuclear magnetic resonant... the whole schmeer. It's certainly easier than making them smarter.

I think the normal thing is to drop trash down a tower with a forced air cross-current. Glass gets diverted less than plastic by the cross-current.

You can also use various densities of liquid, to catch different densities of plastic floating vs. sinking if you've already crushed things up to avoid air bubbles. However, then you need to later separate the liquid from the shredded garbage.

I suppose a law could be passed that versions of a product with different materials would need to be visually distinct? Or manufacturers could voluntarily do it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com