Canada only recycles a staggering nine percent of recyclable plastics. This inefficiency can be attributed to the fact that many items thrown in the recycling bin cannot be recycled[1]. The motivation behind our project stemmed from this inefficiency as we wanted to create a mechanism to correctly, and accurately, detect and dispose of items; this would allow for a more efficient way to get rid of waste. The modeling sub team was tasked with creating a mechanism that rotates a hopper to an incline to allow empty cans and bottles to fall off into a bin; this was to be accomplished with either a rotary or linear actuator. Our design fulfilled this purpose by using a rotary linkage system to lift the hopper to an optimal height in order to let the cans and bottles fall. To elaborate, our design had six pieces in total. The first piece was a disk that was attached to the rotary actuator and the first linkage system. The next three pieces were the linkages themselves which worked in tangent to lift the hopper. The other two pieces were a slider and linkage mount that assisted in sliding and rotating the linkage system respectively. All these parts worked together to finish the task.
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