Currently in a prototype stage but please roast my idea: Working on building a smart trash can. It can do the following: 1. Recognize the item being trashed and auto classify and route it to trash/recycle/compost bin (USP) 2. Allow setup months goals via an app on trash produced and generate recommendations to minimize it 3. Notifications when the trash is closed to being full 4. Auto order trash bags when needed 5. Remind of trash pickup schedule and notify to clean/put put trash before that 6. Reject/warn if something that shouldn’t be trashed but safely recycled (glass, batteries etc) is dumped 7. Air quality indicator in the container and warn when it drops The first launch will be consumer focused. Follow ups include larger commercial grade ones (features TBA) Primary challenge I see right now is keeping the cost of production down so that it doesn’t hamper adoption.
How would the first point work OP? Like you put it in the trash can and it automatically routes to the correct landfill? What?
Like a multi bin trash can. I have one myself but had two lids: trash and no-sort recycling. OP is saying there would be one receptacle that routes to correct bin inside
Lockheed is spot on! My initial design has one entry point where you drop the trash and three containers that is is attached to. It uses image recognition and a classification model to classify it as either trash/recycle/compost and routes it to the proper container.
What rubbish did I just read?
Sounds like a rich person item or a tree hugger dream
You are right. Keeping the price down is one of my main challenges at this point.
Super small market likely. Could sell a few? Not consumer level. Will be way too expensive. I have a trash can and a bucket for recyclables. Other places just have two hole which go go two cans. One for trash, one for recycling. You're talking about saving <1s of brain capacity
More than brain capacity, my goal is to solve problems like these [1] “Many recyclables become contaminated when items are placed in the wrong bin, or when a dirty food container gets into the recycling bin. Contamination can prevent large batches of material from being recycled.” [1] https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/03/13/fix-recycling-america/
You can't solve that problem with this without 100% accuracy and adoption. My clean recycling gets mixed with everyone else's dirty recycling
Seems like a great idea for that guy from “Unnecessary inventions”
You’re solving the wrong problem and you will never be profitable. Plastic recycling is broken and probably was a scam from the get go. Your product sounds extremely expensive, utterly impractical and comprised of disjointed features. It would probably use more energy and create more waste than it conserves.
He’s actually not solving shit lol, that device would probably create more problems. The space such device would require to begin with, taking up half of people’s kitchen and having to be plugged and on the inside to protect all of its technology from the elements, a pain in the ass to empty it, a si for intake that redistributes the trash to the right bin? Imagine the amount of cross contamination from all your waste going through the same intake, and then having to clean the intake… I could go on and on but I already hate this product that doesn’t even exist lol
My perspective is as a female who has lived with dudes. 1. Recognize the item being trashed and auto classify and route it to trash/recycle/compost bin (USP) - great 2. Allow setup months goals via an app on trash produced and generate recommendations to minimize it - this sounds so hard. You’d have image NN capture what crumpled trash looks like in different configurations and then figure out how to minimize it. Or would it just be general ideas—in which case , why wouldn’t t a flyer work? 3. Notifications when the trash is closed to being full - this would be annoying. Wtf can’t you just see this? 4. Auto order trash bags when needed- would it unravel the trash bags and place new ones in there? 5. Remind of trash pickup schedule and notify to clean/put put trash before that- I’ve set my Alexa alert to do this 6. Reject/warn if something that shouldn’t be trashed but safely recycled (glass, batteries etc) is dumped- why is this needed when 1 is in place? 7. Air quality indicator in the container and warn when it drops- this seems redundant with my nose but maybe I’m not that trashy😀 Overall, I would not buy this. Seems like it wouldn’t be enough of a time saver for me to change my current ways. Hope my comments helped and I wasn’t too harsh. Good luck.
Actually this is excellent feedback and precisely what I was looking for! Thank you so much! If I let go of rest of the features but mostly focus on perfecting #1, do you think that is better use of my time. Thanks again for providing the feedback!
What problem are you solving? What’s the productivity/value this creates? Trash/recycling/landfill sorting just isn’t very profitable.
My goal is to solve problems like these [1] “Many recyclables become contaminated when items are placed in the wrong bin, or when a dirty food container gets into the recycling bin. Contamination can prevent large batches of material from being recycled.” [1] https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/03/13/fix-recycling-america/
My hypothesis is that if we are able to automate the trash sorting at the source itself, the sorting problem at commercial recycling centers becomes easier. This could save them money and also reduce the sheer number of items that end up in landfill.
Point 1 task is extremely hard to do in both trash identification and physical sorting task. Commerical recycling center had limited success with using vision based, weight, and hall effect to detect metal. Despite all that a lot of trashes are still be manually sorted. And it's unprofitable unless it's done in china. But after 2018 tariff war started. China has stop accepting low grade trash material. But anyway, you could have situation where a single packing contain multiple type of plastic. Some of them can be recycled and other can't. So user might need to manually dissemble the plastic components when dumping trash. Then there is issue of chemical fluid and powder, identification of these inside and outside of container is very tricky. Large size trash like used electronic will be dismantle. Unless you put some kind of warning. Identification issue could be assuage if you require user to scan bar code of the trash item. Then ask user to sort it manually. But it's possible item is sold with missing barcode or user lose the original packaging. Container type trash could be stuffed with incorrect content. Manual sorted need it again. If in the long shot, some you mastered the trash identification and dismantle problem. It's probably worth millions to commerical recycling facilities. Since the state of art right is still incapable of automate trash identification fully and trash object manipulation is even harder.
Your start up idea is trash - literally
Care to elaborate? Or was that just a pun?
Chill, senor