material separator for recycling?

for my senior project in mechanical engineering .I'm thinking I'd like to design a machine for recycling .Basically ,different kinds of garbage can be thrown into it and separation of the materials for recycling is done by the machine .I'm not sure how to go about it though .I'm thinking the separation process is done by the weight of the materials. How feasible is this idea and how do you guys think i should go about it .
Thank you

John W2013-02-22T00:20:51Z

Favorite Answer

Just search on single stream recycling. Many machines already exist such as vdiscs to remove paper and cardboard, another is an inclined conveyor belt that moves uphill, lighter materials like paper and cardboard ride up, heavier items like containers fall down off the belt. They even have lasers that identifies the material by spectrographs and blasts it off the belt with air blasts.