Tinkering with sustainable recycling solutions

PET bottles carelessly thrown away, shopping bags washed ashore and discarded single-use packaging: plastic waste is a major problem for the environment. In Gran Canaria, this was the starting point for the ‘Smart Green Island Makeathon’, an event that has attracted hundreds of tinkerers to Las Palmas for the ninth time this year. Bremerhaven University of Applied Sciences and the Max-Eyth School in Schiffdorf formed a joint team for the first time to search for innovative technical solutions for recycling.

For most people, a trip to Gran Canaria means relaxing on the beach and soaking up the sun. Not so for Claas Schott and Andreas Menslage, both graduate engineers: every year, these two research and technical staff members travel to the island with a group of particularly motivated and committed students to take part in the ‘Smart Green Island Makeathon’. There, alongside around 750 other participants, they work on solutions for a sustainable circular economy. Not only budding engineers, but also students from other disciplines and school pupils are welcome at the event. “Basically, each group is like a small company. Within the teams, there are a number of tasks to be allocated that have nothing to do with technology. Marketing ideas need to be developed and, at the end, each group must present its idea. There is also a project manager who has to keep an eye on the schedule and the work steps,” explains Menslage. In this way, the participants learn, almost as an aside, how to work with people from other disciplines who have less technical expertise than they do. 

School pupils join the university team for the first time

This year, for the first time, the university staff were joined by four pupils from the Max-Eyth-Schule in Schiffdorf. The vocational school has been collaborating with Bremerhaven University of Applied Sciences for many years on various practical projects. Stefanie Uhe has been responsible for this for around twelve years. The former university staff member values the straightforward and friendly way they interact with one another. “Whether it’s taking part in campus days or lectures, setting up joint projects, or inviting colleagues from the university to give a talk at our school, it’s always a collaborative effort. For me, this partnership is much more than just a formal link – it thrives on the people behind it and the open, respectful collaboration,” she says. The long-standing partnership strengthens the STEM education landscape in the Lower Weser region. “I particularly love that it consistently leads to real highlights, such as our joint participation in the Makeathon on Gran Canaria. Events like this show how well the collaboration works and how much joy it brings to everyone involved,” says Uhe, who travelled to the event with her colleague and headteacher Ralf Biallas.

The partnership also includes participation in the early-entry programme, which the university has been offering for more than 15 years. School pupils attend selected courses as part of this programme. If they sit the exams and pass, they can have the credits recognised towards their degree in Bremerhaven. If they fail, there are no consequences. Lina Stermann and Collin Christian Dücker are also early-entry students and know Schott and Menslage from the laboratory. The fact that they were able to fly to Gran Canaria for the Makeathon this year was an unforgettable experience for them, as well as for Lucie Ingrid Adrian and Jaron Malte Ellis, who also took part as pupils from the Max-Eyth School. Taking part gave the pupils a working environment that was very different from their everyday school life. They got to talk to tech-savvy young people and students from various countries and brought their own strengths to the teamwork. “The Makeathon was a very special experience for me,” summed up Jaron Malte Ellis. What he found particularly appealing was that, alongside the overarching theme of smart automation for greater environmental friendliness, there was plenty of scope for their own ideas, solutions and task allocation.

The right materials always to hand

Schott and Menslage always have an initial suggestion for what the participants can work on. But they leave it up to the tinkerers to decide what the final result will be. “It’s not that easy at first,” admits Andreas Menslage. “We’ve put some thought into it and considered which components we need to bring so that, in the end, something is created that actually works. If the participants then approach it differently than we originally thought, we have to hold back a bit. But that’s exactly what it’s all about: new approaches and ideas that we wouldn’t necessarily have come up with ourselves.” They send materials for their project to Gran Canaria in advance and then arrange transport to the venue the day before the event. 
This year, their project idea was a sorting plant for different types of plastic. As these need to be processed differently, they must be separated at the start of the recycling process. The participants were tasked with figuring out how this could be automated during the 72-hour working period. However, it was up to them whether they chose to work on this or one of the other projects. “Our students are under no obligation to work on our idea. On the first day, all the projects are presented and all participants then decide what interests them most. This means the teams are interdisciplinary and intercultural, which benefits everyone.” Participants will find everything they need to bring their ideas to life on site. Should anything be missing, the organisers will provide it the following day upon request.

Smart bin recognises waste type

One group of pupils, for example, developed a smart bin designed to automatically recognise, compact and sort waste into the appropriate category. To do this, a motion sensor connected to an ESP32 detected when waste was deposited and transmitted this information via Bluetooth Low Energy to a Raspberry Pi. A camera was then triggered; a self-trained deep learning model was designed to distinguish the type of waste. Depending on the result, the bin – divided into four sections – was designed to rotate into the correct position so that the waste landed in the right compartment. The pupils were also particularly impressed by the insights into industrial image processing: a demonstration showed how software can check components on a circuit board for completeness in less than 50 milliseconds.