What Is a Reverse Vending Machine?

A reverse vending machine (RVM) works like a vending machine in reverse: instead of paying for a drink, you return the empty container and get money back. The user feeds bottles or cans into the opening one at a time, the machine checks each one, and at the end it prints a voucher for the shop till or credits a deposit to an app or bank account.

Inside, the process takes a second or two per container. A conveyor or rotating drum carries the container past cameras and sensors that read its barcode and measure its shape, size and material. If it belongs to the scheme and has not been tampered with, the machine accepts it, compacts plastic and cans to save space, and sorts glass by color or into crates. If not, it returns it to the user.

RVMs are the collection point for deposit return schemes (DRS). In a DRS, a small deposit is added to the price of a drink and refunded when the empty container is returned. Large shops host the machines, and smaller ones often take containers back over the counter.

Machines vary in size. A single-feed machine in a convenience store accepts one container at a time and stores a few hundred; a bulk-feed machine in a supermarket accepts a whole bag at once, sorts the contents and holds thousands, with storage behind the wall that staff empty from the back. Bulk machines suit high-volume sites, where queues at the machine would otherwise put people off returning their containers.

Recognition is the heart of the machine. It has to accept every valid container quickly, reject anything outside the scheme and stop people claiming the deposit twice. Machines combine several checks:

Modern machines use cameras and machine vision for most of these checks, with deep learning models that recognize a crushed or label-less container from its shape alone. That speeds up throughput and cuts the number of valid containers rejected, which is the most common customer complaint.

RVMs exist because of deposit return schemes. Germany introduced a single-use deposit in 2003, and Nordic countries have run schemes for decades with high return rates. Many other European countries have since followed, and deposit return schemes are planned for the USA, which means many more RVMs in shops. A central scheme operator sets the deposit, registers products and pays shops a handling fee for each container they collect.

An RVM is a demanding place for a computer. It runs vision models on several camera streams in real time, controls motors and sensors, prints receipts, talks to the till and the scheme back office, and runs all day in a shop entrance or store room. It has to do this for years with little attention.

The COM Express reverse vending case study shows deep learning running on Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics, speeding up container recognition without a separate GPU card. OpenVINO is the toolkit that runs those models efficiently on Intel CPUs and GPUs. Our COM Express SBCs suit machine builders who want a long-life board they can design around.

Lifecycle matters as much as performance. An RVM model is certified with a scheme and then built for years, so its computer has to stay available and unchanged for most of that time, with long-term support for the processor and the operating system. Embedded boards with a published roadmap avoid a redesign halfway through a production run. The same thinking applies to other self-service machines; our kiosk computers for OEMs case study shows how machine builders receive computers ready to fit.

We supply the embedded boards and computers that machine builders design into RVMs and kiosks, with the operating system and vision toolkit installed as standard, and test each one before it ships. Tell us your cameras and I/O and we will specify the board.