Virtual Booth

The world produces approximately 2.24 billion tons of solid waste annually, with 33% not properly managed and 50% of household waste consists of recyclable waste. While recycling is essential for sustainability, waste segregation ensures recycling efforts are effective. We aimed to create a segregation system using the electrostatic field and electromagnetic field in one machine with an AI (artificial intelligence) system for automation to distribute the waste for segregation. It was powered by solar energy. Data was collected to investigate efficiency of EMES versus manual segregation and to investigate the quality of segregation in EMES. We found EMES segregation system has a fixed time of 80s for segregation of the waste materials in all 10 trials.  EMES is 100 % consistent (no variability). In Manual Segregation, time varies across trials (ranging from 250 to 600 seconds) with a mean time of 361.8s and 4.4x longer than EMES with p < 0.001. The quality of segregation was significantly better for metal waste by electromagnetic field as compared to non-metal waste using electrostatic field (p <0.05).  The electromagnetic field had lower contamination (20% vs. 50%). The EMES segregation system was faster and more efficient, while Electromagnetic Field produced high quality segregation. This precision is significantly important in industrial waste segregation settings.