International Journal of Scientific & Engineering Research, Volume 7, Issue 7, July-2016 899

ISSN 2229-5518

An Automated System for Sorting Plastics by

Color
Tomris Nurdane Mortas
Abstract— Nowadays, color and color application science and technology have widely used throughout the world for a long time ever
since such a need arose in the manufacturing industry. A color sorting system provides sorting out objects by different properties
compromising shape, color and etc. Color sorting machines have been found working on the purpose to seperate materials in every type of
industrial wastes. In this paper, it has been developed and built a multiple sorting electromechanical system on plastic materials on different
colors as a prototype. The prototype in this study consists of hardware and software systems. Hardware system is designed by using
conveyor belt, microcontroller and LCD display as the user interface unit, and also feeding the system.

Index Terms— automated color sorter, LED, microcontroller, PIC16F877, sorting plastics, PIC C, Proteus

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1 INTRODUCTION
Waste, depending on the type of material, consists on un- human capabilities, like: eyes capacity, fatigue, concentration
wanted materials left over from manufacturing processes (in- and health. In these context automatic systems based on sen-
dustrial, commercial, mining or agricultural operations,) or sors appears in different countries and shows to be efficient
from community and household activities. Everyday, tones of facilities to separate the waste [3, 7, 8]. The most typical appa-
waste are generated; causing a major problem to various cities ratus work with a high-resolution color sensor or a spectrome-
and their municipal authorities due to the shortage of landfill ter to scan the near infrared spectrum. Color cameras have

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to dump such waste. Therefore, recycling is becoming an im- been used to sort materials into white, green, brown and opa-
portant issue with the shortage of the landfill and environ- que fractions or construction waste into different material
mental pollutions as well as its economical impact [1]. classes [3, 9]. There have been studied automated sorting ma-
Waste, especially household and commercial waste, is a hete- chines based on color using visible reflectance spectroscopy
rogeneous mixture of different kinds of products, containing (VIS) [8] artificial intelligent systems using near infrared ref-
reusable or recyclable materials, and their size/condition lectance (NIR) measurements [1] and integrated systems [7].
mainly depend on how the waste is collected and transported Although of the higher technical capabilities of these equip-
[1-3]. Plastic bottles, for example, are the main municipal ments, their usage is not a guarantee of a good sorting process,
waste and they are non-biodegradable materials (are chemical- purity and recovery of multiple resources. Therefore, the
ly stable). In fact, plastic waste can be visible for months or present study intends to improve the knowledge about auto-
years and is a serious environmental problem [1, 4]. Hence, the matic systems. For this purpose an automated sorting system
treatment of plastic wastes becomes a serious problem and it is is developed to support multiple plastic materials classifica-
necessary to develop an effective recycling process. tion based on sensors.
The efficiency and quality of all recycling process depends Automated sorting system will be developed to support mul-
highly on the purity and accuracy of the sorted raw materials tiple plastic materials classification on the conveyor belt.
[1]. Waste separation is a critical component of any successful Normally, sorting systems consist of a conveyor road for the
integrated waste management system [5] and several technol- separation and steadying of the material, a detector which is
ogies are being developed (by size, shape, color, volume, etc.). placed underneath or above the conveying belt and banks
The open literature presents several works for detecting and which blow out the material component that is to be sorted.
sorting different materials in order to sort them out and pre- The hardware consists of control section, the detecting section,
pare them to be recycled [1, 4, 6]. and conveyor blocks. Microcontroller is used to perform con-
Plastic bottles, for example, can be sorted into different catego- nection to the peripherals units, and to provide the system’s
ries based on their chemical resin, transparency and/or color, control. The PIC16F877 microcontroller is used in the design
however, the last one is much more adequate [1]. In terms of work. Sorting system has been developed to perform sending
color, the plastic bottles can be sorted by manual procedures plastics into the correct banks by the conveyor belt. The block
or by sensor systems. diagram of the system’s hardware is shown in Fig. 1 and Fig.
The first one presents some inconveniences relatively to the 2. Plastics with different colors, dimensions and shape are
moving on a conveyor belt. For the sorting system, additional
apparatus are necessary such as control card, sensor, lcd,
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• Tomris Nurdane Mortas is currently pursuing Ph.D degree in Mechatron-
bunkers for material feeding, platform for sorter, conveyor
ics Engineering, Sakarya University, Turkey and working at Abdullah Gul
University, Kayseri, Turkey E-mail: [email protected] systems for inlet and outlets. Different plastic materials, with
different colors, are scanned on the conveyor belt by detectors
and will be deposited into different containers in function of
their colors as shown on lcd as an interface for showing the
actions of the system and displaying the necessary referrals to
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International Journal of Scientific & Engineering Research, Volume 7, Issue 7, July-2016 900
ISSN 2229-5518
the user during the operation of the system.

Fig. 1. Schematic illustration of automated sorting system

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Fig. 3. Design of detecting system

The detecting elements are made by hand. These elements

makes the system to run by detecting the color of samples on
conveyor belt with the distance 20-40 mm where it is used LDR
to sense color. It is designed the detecting system as shown in
Fig 3. with the usage of LDR. LDR should be insulated from the
light through the color sorting system.
Fig. 2. Circuit diagram

Fig. 4. Illustration of LED system

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International Journal of Scientific & Engineering Research, Volume 7, Issue 7, July-2016 901
ISSN 2229-5518
cessful from according to receiving data from detecting sys-
tem. Communication between microcontroller and periph-
erals, such as LCD display, tested, and successful results were
obtained.
Plastics material sorting technologies promote lower costs
with higher performance when compared to the manual pro-
cedure. An automated detector system for recycling waste
plastics with different colors was developed. This equipment
can be adapted to different materials with the changing of the
sensors, separating more than three colors and appliable on
different needs.

REFERENCES
[1] Tachwali Y., Al-Assaf Y., Al-Ali A.R. (2007) Automatic multistage classifica-
tion system for plastic bottles recycling, Resources, Conservation and Recy-
cling 52, 266–285
[2] Al-Salem S.M., Lettieri P., Baeyens J.(2009) Recycling and recovery routes of
plastic solid waste (PSW): A review, Waste Management 29, 2625–2643
[3] Killmann D., Pretz T. (2006) Possibilities of sensor based sorting regarding
recycling Of waste, Acta Metallurgica Slovaca, 12, 188 - 193
[4] Biddle M., Dinger, P. Fisher, M. (1999) An Overview of recycling plastics from
durable goods: challenges and opportunities, Indentiplast II, Belgium
[5] McDougall F., White P., Franke M. (2001) Integrated solid waste manage-
ment: a life cycle inventory Blackwell Science, London
Fig. 5. Proteus simulation of circuit

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[6] Stchur P., Cleveland D., Zhou J., Michel R.G. (2002) A review of recent appli-
cations of near infrared spectroscopy, and of the characteristics of a novel PbS
CCD array-based near-infrared spectrometer, Appl Spectrosc Rev; 37(4):383–
Here, with the usage B port of microprocessor, it was intended
428
to control of LED. When red led can be controlled through [7] Shutov F. (1999) Effective Energy and Gas Emission Savings Using Plastics
resistance conntected to microprocessor directly due to the Waste Recycling Technologies Expert Group Meeting On Industrial Energy
need more current, others can be controlled BC548 transistors Efficiency, Cogeneration and Climate Change, Vienna International Center,
as shown in Fig. 4 and more about system configuration can Vienna, Austria
be seen in Fig. 5. [8] Safavi S.M., Masoumi H., Mirian S.S.,Tabrizchi M. (2010) Sorting of polypro-
pylene resins by color in MSW using visible reflectance spectroscopy, Waste
Management 30, 2216–2222
[9] Habich U.(2007) Sensor-Based Sorting Systems in Waste Processing, Interna-
At this stage of study, system software is discussed. Control tional Symposium MBT, 308-315.
program for the system is written in PIC programming lan-
guage. It is programmed PIC C language with the part of this
sorting system’ software programming. The reason why is
preferred PIC C language is that programs written in PIC C
language are easier to write and have advantages in terms of
efficient performance and similarity to machine languages.
Control program that enables the transition from as a result of
the branches in the decision cycles to sensor provides to con-
tact with peripheral units, such as lcd and detectors. In this
system decision mechanisms are processing by the control
program without user intervention. While the main program
is processing, frequently realization of some systems, such as
sensing and sorting, disrupts the operation of the main pro-
gram, thus the program completes a cycle time longer than
expected. Needed processes to control all conditison can be
done to minimize all adverse conditions and there can be pro-
vided the operation of the system more efficiently.

4 CONCLUSION
The required hardware and software were made for sending
any number of data using a microcontroller via the detecting
system. The system with microcontroller has been tested at
first, and reached the conclusion that communication is suc-
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