Our product, RECYCLEASY, enhances campus recycling efficiency by separating liquids from plastic bottles, reducing contamination of recyclable materials, and decreasing the workload on recycling facilities. With a simple 3-second bottle disposal process and innovative design, it ensures sustainability and convenience for both users and custodians.

Sustainability was at the heart of RECYCLEASY’s design ethos and purpose, as the prototype sought to enhance recycling efficiency while minimizing its environmental footprint. The team prioritized waste reduction and resource efficiency in several ways:

By effectively draining liquids from bottles, RECYCLEASY reduced contamination in recyclable materials, enabling sorting facilities to process plastics more efficiently. The prototype was largely passive in operation, relying on minimal energy for its automated features. This low-energy approach ensured that the system’s environmental impact remained minimal during usage.

While the prototype incorporated durable materials such as PVC pipes to ensure functionality and longevity, the team recognized the environmental drawbacks of PVC due to its high Okala impact score.  As such, to improve the sustainability of our product, we seek to explore eco-friendly alternatives such as cast iron or biodegradable materials in future iterations.

SCOPE  — Our project scope could have been wider. Early in the term, we narrowed our scope from aluminum cans and plastic bottles to only the latter. This gave us a more manageable scope, indeed, but we later realized in our testing phase that our prototype could also handle aluminum cans. This is notable given that many beverages on-campus are sold in these containers. 

PROTOTYPE ITERATION — We could have iterated more on the important design choices (e.g., the mesh angle and container sizes). While we did extensively test throughout the building process, we still realize that more iterations could have better optimized our designs. For example, we could test a wider range of mesh angles to determine which would work best together with our sensor-operated door. Additionally, a larger container would have increased our capacity and decreased the frequency of maintenance.

RESOURCE ALLOCATION — We should have adopted a more “make things, break things” approach. We were, at times, hesitant to find more creative solutions as we had unnecessarily limited ourselves to only one prototype (i.e., only one trash can/container).

TESTING — Our testing phase should have answered the question, “How often do the liquid waste and bottles have to be collected?” This is an important point for our purchasers, especially the custodians who are responsible for maintaining the prototype.

FEEDBACK — We should have considered earlier and constant feedback from all stakeholders (students, custodians, Casella, sorting facilities, etc.), which would have led to more informed design choices. We still collected user and purchaser feedback, of course, but much of it was late into our testing phase. 

As a team, we feel that this class introduced us to the essence of engineering: make, break, iterate. While we are still inexperienced in much of the prototyping process, we learned a wealth of important skills that helped us improve tremendously. And all told, we will leave ENGS21 with a more creative, confident, and solution-driven outlook on our engineering problems.

Of course, we thank the following people for helping us throughout our learning journey: Professor Vicki May, Susan Weider, Kevin Baron (our assigned Technical Instructor), the ENGS21 Review Board, Tad Truex, Danny DeNauw, Joe Poissant, Marina Rodriguez (our assigned TA), and the MShop and ENGS21 TAs.