Over the years, municipal solid waste generation has uninterruptedly increased as a result of global changes associated with population, consumption and industrial growth. The increasing solid waste should be effectively managed in order to prevent pollution of the environment and the associated harm to ecosystem and human health. Waste sorting is an important step in waste management and recycling because it allows the recovery of a decent percentage of the resources contained in the disposed waste. The success of the waste management policy is based on good sorting practice due to the fact that sorted waste can be treated further. The statistics of waste management across the globe indicates that the cities which apply waste sorting system decrease the landfilling to a large extent and increase the recycling rate.
There are different waste separation ways to separate different fractions in a waste stream. For example, sorting can be implemented in material recovery facilities(MRFs) by garbage sorting machines or sorting several waste fractions at home by inhabitants. Sorting of objects or products is a continuous industrial process. Centuries ago, manual sorting was the traditional approach used in the industries. In this approach, visual inspection is performed by human operators before the sorting process is carried out. Meanwhile, the traditional approach is tedious, time consuming, slow and inefficient. The Industrial Revolution of about 1760 to sometime between 1820 and 1840 which was the transition to new manufacturing processes brought about automation that included going from hand production methods to machines processes.
Automatic garbage sorting technology is the creation and application of technologies to produce and deliver goods and services with minimal human intervention. The implementation of automatic waste sorting technologies, techniques and processes improve the efficiency, reliability and speed of many tasks that were previously performed by humans. Other merits of automating the industrial processes are; productivity, greater consistency, flexibility, safety, cost reduction, elimination of human error and thus improvement in the quality of the products offered.