Development of Reverse Vending Machine (RVM) Framework for Implementation to a Standard Recycle Bin

Nowadays with the increasing amount of waste generated and limited landfill space for waste disposal, recycling is one of the important approaches to manage the waste effectively. The current manual recycling practice in which the user need to bring the waste in bulk to the recycling center might be hassle and hence become a discouraging factor for them to recycle. To overcome such an issue, in this project an automated recycle bin with a reward feature is proposed that derived from a reverse vending machine (RVM) concept. Basically, the system is implemented in a standard recycle bin provided by local municipal that equipped with microcontroller and collection of sensors. Throughout the process, the sensors responsible to identifying user information, weight the scale and eventually convert the weight to the corresponding points automatically. Once the process completed, the user can claim their points by using RFID point card. All the mentioned process will be controlled by a microcontroller. The system has been implemented in a small scale user testing and the framework shows its effectiveness for handling the whole process. The prototype is expected to aid in accelerating the motivation among Malaysian to recycle their waste, and can be one of the frameworks to overcome urban poverty issue by using waste to wealth concept.