The recycling industry should develop automated ways to separate garbage appropriately, in a central location; perhaps using machine learning. Then you eliminate the UX altogether. The best UX is no UX.
What? You can't just say 'machine learning' about every (perceived) problem you hear.
It might be a good idea to separate paper/dry stuff from wet stuff and glass from the start, though. Just the way it's done in many countries.
(I heard that in one of the poorer regions of the city I live in, the trash is thrown into a single "bin" after collection, and possibly separated from there. Don't know if that's true though).
Applying ML to non-classification problems is when it is NOT appropriate, but this is a good pick.
Classifying by physical properties is even easier by simply classifying by physical properties. Want to pull all ferrous metals out of a pile of stuff? Just use a magnet. Want to sort tin from plastic? Blower and conveyor bins by flight distance.
Incidentally, those elements not easily covered by this kind of sorting (which has been used for many years) is also not easy to cover by magical do-all machine learning, which will have a hard time sorting plastic-coated paper from paper from plastics, just like the processes above.
ML is useful when you cannot make a clear difference using physical properties only. For example, if you treat different types of plastic garbage, you will probably want to separate bottles from other types of plastics, and you can do that with visual sorting and pattern matching.
> which will have a hard time sorting plastic-coated paper from paper from plastics, just like the processes above.
Certainly, but then this is when you still need some manual work at some point of the chain. But physical filtering + ML could reduce the human part of the work to exceptions.
(0) It isn't hard.
(1) If the trash bins are aligned in a predictable manner, then you can even do it without thinking.
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2016/06/10/three-startups-find...
If it would send it to separate process of separating the bag from its contents then I will up the game. How about a can with something in it. Or a cardboard box with bags in it.
I think you can't just slap ML on the problem and say it's done.
It's called mixed-waste processing: http://greenblue.org/reloop-what-is-mixed-waste-processing-o...
Not mixing trash is definitely easier.
The best UX is happiness, beauty, convenience, pleasure, security, justice, idealism, power and so on. Did you really mean to say the best UX is no UX? :)
Thanks! I shall add it to the article.