Design and development of a beverage container returns system

Abstract

In just a single minute, over a million plastic bottles are sold and purchased by consumers all over the world (1). The huge downside to this is that the vast majority of these will end up either polluting an ocean or in an equally polluting landfill. In the EU, only 30 percent of these plastics are recycled, with the rest either going to landfills (31 percent) or being incinerated (39 percent) (2). Ireland is one of the worst polluting countries in the EU with average of 65 kilograms of plastic waste being generated per capita (3). From these terrifying statistics we can see that it is very important for everyone to reduce their plastic consumption and if a plastic container has to be used, like with a beverage bottle, to make sure that this is recycled.

Recycling schemes are already in place in different countries like Finland and Germany, the former which records a staggering 90% recycle rate of beverage containers (4). This is in stark contrast with the earlier mentioned EU numbers and Ireland’s own recycling percentage of only 28 percent(5). To combat this terrifying number, the government of Ireland passed a “Deposit Return Scheme for plastic bottles and aluminium cans” (6) which is set to be in place by Q3 2022. The plan with this project is to create a user-friendly, automated bottle and can recovery machine which will efficiently determine the inserted item and credit users accordingly. This will be industry focused and the main focus will be on creating an easy to implement solution that will be as flawless as possible. Hopefully this system can be implemented on a wider scale and better the state of Irish recycling.