Saturday, November 1, 2014

Fruit flies shut down space-age German tech

As a fairly small country with a long tradition of engineering pride, Germans see themselves as a nation of tinkerers and optimizers.

Their successes are legion - and their failures are interesting. This blog has highlighted some failures in the field of computing, it's one area where people are in the way.

In other areas, nature is in the way.

The statement is obvious, and the engineers would be the first ones to agree. But glitches continue because of, well, nature.

The fruit flies that shut down the plastic bottle recycling machine at our supermarket are an example which proves the point.

Known for their efforts to recycle, Germans slapped a deposit on plastic bottles at a time other countries were still using 100% glass. With a deposit comes the issue of return. For store brand mineral water, for example, the deposit on the bottle exceeds the price of water + bottle at the cash register.

Normal engineers see a problem as an engineering problem, so they set out to develop a neat machine to collect empty containers and to dispense the deposit.
This approach was received well in a society that not only looks down on scavengers trying be productive but that very much ostracizes such people.

The resulting space-age box is a six foot tall and about six foot wide modern engineering triumph. An empty bottle is feed into an opening where belts grab it and drag it over a barcode reader.
The barcode being quite small, the machine will turn the bottle around until it finds the barcode at one of the many possible locations.
A happy beep confirms the scan, and the LCD display keeping you up to date on the progress adds another 25 cent credit until you are done and press the Done button.

In the couple of seconds between the happy beep and adding the deposit credit, the bottle disappears from view and is flattened though crushing. The cacophony of sounds accompanying this step does frighten small children. We have seen this happen but could not find any research on the long term effects of being exposed to crushing, screeching, and gurgling noises as a small child.

Crushing the bottle to minimize storage space releases the minute amounts of liquid which soon creates the perfect fruit fly habitat.

We have also experienced all the standard things that go wrong:
  • Scratched barcodes
  • Barcodes with residue on them
  • Bottles deflated when you take them from a warm house into a freezing outside winterscape
  • Bottles cut into two for some DIY project, then taped back together
  • And the worst: the wrong kind of bottle!

The machines flat out reject:
  • Multiple use PET bottles despite a deposit on these, too
  • One way bottles that carry no deposit at all - they exist in Germany!
  • Non-German bottles, whatever their deposit status may be
 
And then there are the fruit flies. Capable to live on small amounts of leftovers from bottles, they make many generations of offspring.

The machines do not have any signs telling fruit flies to stay away from belts, rollers, and crushers, so thousands of the poor guys get slaughtered each summer in every single automated deposit machine.

Their carcasses gum up the works with that powerful paste of protein, blood and guts.
For the few hours between the maintenance call and the fix, it is back to manual return.

Why don't they just blast the machine with bug spray?

You have not been to Germany in the last 20 years, have you?

TIP: Do not try to redeem bottle deposits at any machine in Germany on Saturdays. The lines are long, the tempers short. Some people come to drop off a whole car full of bottles. so jam packed that they could probably drive the car into a lake, climb out on top and paddle across, thanks to the buoyancy of the bottles.


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