Skip to main content

Space age Bin-e trash can scans, sorts, and compacts your rubbish automatically

Bine in action
When you think about real-world uses for artificial intelligence, chances are that “smart trash can” isn’t one of the first things that springs to mind. Nonetheless, that’s what an innovative startup from Poland, called Bin-e, has created with its forthcoming line of trash-sorting waste disposal units. The smart bins use a range of smart sensors, cameras, deep learning image recognition algorithms to make it so you’ll never again have to sort your paper from your plastic or glass — if the technology catches on, that is.

“Bin-e uses artificial intelligence to identify the type of waste that is being disposed of, segregates the waste, compresses it, and places it in the relevant chamber automatically,” Jakub Luboński, CEO and co-founder of Bin-e, told Digital Trends. “The embedded computer gathers data about every item that enters each chamber, and uploads it on the cloud database. The maintenance crew of the office building management company is notified via an app when to collect the contents of full chambers. The software is based on deep learning algorithms and learns with time about new objects. Data stored includes information on consumption patterns, which products and brands the users are consuming, the time, and quantity.”

Image used with permission by copyright holder

Although we’ve covered some nifty trash disposal units in the past, the Bin-e trash can claims to be the world’s first smart waste bin company, complete with its own cloud-based Internet of Things platform. At present, the team is still showing off prototypes, but going forward, the plan is to develop solutions that could be used in offices, in outdoor environments, or even in regular homes.

“Bin-e will be introduced to the Polish and German smart buildings market this October,” Luboński continued. From there, the plan is to start rolling out to additional countries from 2018. No price has been finalized, but the plan is to charge an upfront cost for installation and then a monthly subscription fee.

If the results can help improve recycling rates and, heck, just make the simple act of tossing away an empty can of soda a little bit more fun, we’re all for this. It’s certainly not the weirdest IoT device we’ve come across, by any stretch of the imagination.

Luke Dormehl
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more