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French winner of the James Dyson Award 2024, Binko is an ambitious intelligent robot project capable of automatically recognizing, crushing and sorting waste. Demonstrated this summer during the Olympic Games, it could contribute to better waste management in many public places.
For the 20th edition of the James Dyson Award, a famous international engineering and design competition, the French jury has therefore selected the project Binko. It is a solution that combines both a recycling machine and an application powered by waste recognition software. In theory, it can now identify more than 2.6 million pieces of waste simply from a camera, by reading a barcode or via image recognition technology.
In concrete terms, the machine recognizes the waste, then crushes it into small pieces and sorts it into one of the seven transparent compartments inside. In the end, the different components of the waste are separated, allowing the recycling of all those that can be recycled.
After three years of development, a first prototype was demonstrated in front of the Paris City Hall throughout the Olympic Games. The idea is to one day be able to install this type of robot in public places such as train stations, shopping centers or stadiums, in order to eliminate any sorting errors but also reduce costs. According to its designers, this solution would make it possible to recycle 2.7 times more resources while reducing costs by 36%.
This project is led by a young entrepreneur, Romain Pellat, a graduate in Design Thinking. Binko has already been awarded 5,800 euros, while perhaps waiting to add the 35,000 euros rewarding the invention that won the James Dyson Award at the international level.
The goal is nevertheless to build a more advanced version of the product, which will one day pave the way for mass production. In the meantime, a consumer application is due to be launched soon, which will allow anyone to identify any type of waste in order to recycle it perfectly. The application will therefore provide a photo recognition service but also a map of recycling bins located nearby.