MASSENA -- Students from Clarkson University who recently worked with St. Lawrence NYSARC to improve efficiency at the Massena recycling center demonstrated the results at NYSID’s first “Cultivating Resources for Employment with Assistive Technology” (CREATE) Symposium at the legislative office building in Albany.

REVISED, the Clarkson team’s project, stands for "Recycling as a Viable Industry for Supported Employment of those with Disability." Students worked with St. Lawrence NYSARC’s recycling center in Massena to improve its efficiency by providing more accurate counts of the quantity and classification of redeemable recyclables, enhancing the sorting process, and keeping a better estimate of the outflow of counted items.

The students who participated in the symposium were Madison Lyndaker John Rockwood, Joe Romeo and Sarah David.

They were accompanied by their instructor, Charles Robinson, director of Clarkson’s Center for Rehabilitation Engineering, Science and Technology (CREST) and Shulman Chair of Rehabilitation Engineering. Prof. Boris Jukic of the School of Business co-advised the group.

Tracy Tuttle of St. Lawrence NYSARC, a NYSID member agency, also accompanied the Clarkson team to the symposium.

Students from Clarkson’s business school also participated in the project by analyzing the flow of the redeemable material through St. Lawrence NYSARC’s current process and by recommending process improvements to the Biomedical Engineering Senior Design group.

Their principal recommendation was to separate four types of redeemables at the intake table: plastic water containers, other plastic containers, cans, and glass bottles. The current process has one hole for all recyclables except glass bottles, and required multiple subsequent sorts.

A previous group of bomedical engineering senior design students built a new, three-hole table with modular parts that they fabricated. This table could be assembled in 10 minutes, and disassembled and packed flat in five minutes.

This semester’s design students worked on the sensing and display electronics and the wiring interconnects for that table, and interfaced all of the counters to a computer. Commercial sensors and displays were used to allow for ease of future maintenance.

The table displayed at the CREATE Symposium was a working model that tracked and separately displayed the number of water, plastic, cans, and glass bottles returned by a single customer, and another separate daily total for each category. It also calculated and displayed for the customer a running count of the dollar and cent value that they would receive.

CREATE is an initiative sponsored by NYSID (New York State Industries for the Disabled, Inc.) that brings undergraduate and graduate engineers from colleges and universities across New York together with community rehabilitation agencies.