Recycling system joins the network of beverage bottles and can turn waste into treasure

A special machine is installed at the entrance of the supermarket in Norway. People who walk into the supermarket will put the waste bottles and cans that they bring into the round holes above the machine. In a moment, the machine will spit out a coupon and print out the value of the bottles and cans. The coupons will be effective immediately. You can withdraw them when you buy something. This machine is the most famous Tomra recycling system in the world. It has already been used in Northern Europe, the United States and Japan.

The working principle of the Tomra recycling system is not complicated. The waste beverage bottles and cans are stuffed in from the round holes and immediately scanned by the laser device. The microprocessor compares the information with the stored bottle information and immediately identifies the type of each bottle. , or plastic, or glass, or metal, then enter the sorting device. Here, the plastic was cut into small pieces and the aluminum cans were flattened and the volume was reduced to 1/15 on average. The collection container can be set by the user, according to the number of types of bottles collection, such as six kinds of bottles and cans will be automatically divided into six collection containers, no need for sorting.

Tomra's invention dates back to the 1970s. Peter, a Norwegian, worked in the self-selected market for 10 years and sold tagged machinery and equipment. Oslo, the leading supermarket owner in the city of Oslo, complained to him that he was almost overwhelmed by waste bottles and had to find a better method of recycling. Peter said he was sorry that the company he worked for was only labelled and did not have this ability, but he would tell his brother Taue to see if there was any way for him.

Tauer was a competent engineer who was involved in the development of the world’s first supertanker automated navigation system. He began to distract from Mr. Eitch’s “bottle problem”. First, he met the self-selected market owner. The bosses slyly portrayed what they wanted: a machine with a hole dug in it, the customer just plugging the bottle in, and the value of the recycled items. The bottle factory owner provides a complete set of bottle specifications data for design purposes. Taue and Peter quickly came up with design ideas and said that the prototype machine needed 20,000 Norwegian kronor. The owner of the self-selected market did not wrinkle and agreed to save money. On January 2, 1972, the first Tomra recycling machine was launched at a supermarket in Iche, and by the end of the year, the number of recycling machines would have reached 29 units. Later, at the request of the Swedish wine oligarch Systembolaget, the production of a special model that was used in conjunction with its vending machines throughout the country was also a success.

However, the company's real leap was in 1977. The new model adopted a new generation of bottle identification technology. The phototubes used by Tomra's old models, despite their reliable operation, require that each jar be handled by a special machine and require manual correction and expensive maintenance. The emergence of microprocessors in the mid-1970s brought Tomra the gospel. In 1978, it introduced the first user-configurable recycling system. The new models widely used microprocessors, optical fibers and laser technologies. Advanced means. Its bottle identification system is based on electronically stored bottle data. Each bottle is jammed in, and the machine immediately recognizes which vessel, material, and whether it has a deductible value by discriminating and matching it. It uses a graphical touch screen that is easy for customers to use. Store owners can easily configure themselves based on the size of their store.

Very special, because it has a built-in modem, Tomra recycling systems installed throughout the world can be connected to the headquarters via the Internet. The bottles that were "eaten" by each machine were counted in real-time and aggregated in real-time to the head office's information center. If you click on Tomra's website, there is a counter on the bottom right that shows dynamic numbers at any time. This is "the number of waste containers newly collected by the Tomra system worldwide from the time you boarded the Tomra website to now." I tried 1 minute on August 25. During this time, 52,342 drink containers were recovered by the Tomra system.

Source: China Nonferrous Metals