Smartpac compactor

For my mechanical engineering senior capstone experience, I worked on a project with Kelsey Bing, Nathan Kau, and Eric Brandon partnering with Amazon. Essentially, we created a compactor for Amazon’s plastic mail carriers called Smartpacs so that delivery trucks can collect them and bring them back to Amazon for recycling purposes. Here is a video of our device in action. Below is our abstract from our capstone report.

“Amazon alone accounts for over one-third (36.9% as of 2019) of all United States e-commerce, and every year, millions of their products ship in Smartpac: an Amazon-branded, three-layer pouch made primarily of high-density polyethylene (HDPE) plastic. In fact, 70,000 tons of Smartpac—about 1.4 billion of them—will be shipped by 2021. While they are recyclable, plastic wraps and films of this sort can only be recycled through specialty drop-off bins commonly found at grocery stores. This is a largely unknown procedure, so most consumers do not take their plastic wraps and films to the grocery store for proper disposal, and because these consumers are unable to recycle this material through standard curbside recycling programs, hundreds of thousands of Smartpacs end up in landfills every year. To keep Smartpacs out of landfills, we designed a device that compacts and bundles them for efficient and inexpensive recovery by Amazon’s reverse logistics network. Once recovered, Amazon can then forward the used Smartpacs to the correct recycling facilities. We tested several mechanisms and processes for compacting and bundling the plastic packaging, ranging from shredding and vacuum-sealing to compressing and melting, keeping in mind our technical requirements of compaction, ease-of-operation, and safety. Our final device feeds one Smartpac at a time through three sets of rollers—two for popping the air bubbles and one for compressing the Smartpac—reducing the volume of the Smartpac by approximately 51%. From there, a stacker apparatus guides the plastic packaging into one continuous stack. Lastly, the Smartpacs are bundled through a compression process that uses a system of eight soldering irons to rivet the stack together. The consumer then removes and places the Smartpac bundle on their doorstep (or other similar location) for recovery by Amazon’s reverse logistics network, thereby keeping one more set of Smartpacs out of landfills.”

-written by Celine Wang, Kelsey Bing, Nathan Kau, and Eric Brandon Kam

Please contact me if you would like to see the full report.