Reverse Vending Machine History and ABB Robots

A reverse vending machine takes an empty bottle or can, reads it, crushes or stores it and pays back the deposit. It sits at the front of a shop, but behind it is a long chain of counting, sorting and baling that is slowly being automated. This post follows the job from shopkeepers paying for returned bottles by hand, through the first bottle return machines in Sweden and Norway, to the small Tomra B3 that launched in the UK in September 2026 and the robots now being tested to sort returned bottles. It also looks at where ABB robots fit, and where that is still only a possibility.

A row of bottle and can refund machines for cans, plastic and glass in a US store, 2014. Photo: Mike Mozart / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

How shops counted returned bottles before the machines

Paying people to bring bottles back is older than any machine. In 1799 A & R Thwaites & Co in Dublin advertised that it would pay two shillings a dozen for its returned soda water bottles, and Schweppes ran a similar return policy from about 1800. None of this was law. Glass was expensive, so bottlers wanted it back to wash and refill. For more than a century the return point was a shop counter, where a clerk checked each bottle by eye, counted it, paid out the deposit and stacked it in a crate for the bottler's next delivery.

A milkman delivering on the Toronto Islands in winter, 1944. Photo: The Globe and Mail via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Inventors tried to move that work into a machine early. On 13 September 1920 Elmer Jones and Sue Walker registered an American patent for an "Empty Container Return and Handling Machine" that paid back coins. It took about thirty years before a working bottle return machine was built and sold. That came from Wicanders in Sweden, whose machines were in use through the 1950s. Deposits also moved into law in this period: British Columbia's deposit return system, passed in 1970, is the oldest such programme in North America.

Broken glass from no deposit, non returnable bottles on the Washington shore of the Columbia River, April 1973. Photo: David Falconer, EPA DOCUMERICA / NARA via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Norway became the centre of the industry. In 1962 Aage Tveitan built an automatic bottle return machine that his firm, Arthur Tveitan ASA, made in large numbers. In 1972 the brothers Tore and Petter Planke founded TOMRA in Asker to design and sell reverse vending machines, and in 1974 the Swedish alcohol retailer Systembolaget ordered 100 of them. Sweden put a deposit on PET bottles and aluminium cans by law in 1984. The basic sequence has stayed the same since: the machine turns the container, reads its barcode, checks its shape, then crushes it or sends it to the right bin.

A TOMRA T710 reverse vending machine for empty bottles in Germany, 2017. Photo: KarleHorn / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

Smaller machines, smarter scanners and robots behind the counter

Reverse vending is now a large business. TOMRA alone has more than 91,000 machines installed worldwide. The latest news is about fitting them into small shops. On 21 September 2026 TOMRA launched the TOMRA B3 in the UK ahead of the deposit return scheme that starts in October 2027, when shoppers will pay a refundable 20p on drinks bottles and cans. The B3 takes up 0.45 square metres, handles PET and metal cans, can stand on wheels and identifies containers with barcode reading, weight checks and image recognition. Scheme operator Exchange for Change will pay retailers a higher handling fee for automated collection.

Two reverse vending machines for deposit bottles at a Lidl store in Bunde, Germany, 2019. Photo: Donald Trung Quoc Don / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Asia is building the same system. Singapore's Beverage Container Return Scheme opened on 1 April 2026 with a 10 cent deposit, and TOMRA installed 350 machines across the Central and North-Eastern regions. The transition ended on 1 October 2026, when the scheme fully took effect. Recognition is the hard part. Older machines matched a container's shape against a database; newer ones read the barcode and use AI to recognise the container, and Aco Recycling sells an AI recognition module for these machines. A container the scanner cannot read is rejected and goes back to the shopper.

The view through the opening of a TOMRA bottle and can machine in Dornbirn, Austria, down the conveyor that carries each container inside. Photo: Asurnipal / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Robots are starting to appear behind the machines. Germany has a large pool of reusable glass bottles in standard crates, and returned bottles end up mixed. The KORINS project at RPTU Kaiserslautern, run from 2020 to 2023 with Ximaj IT-Solutions, combined cameras, ultrasonic sensors and AI with lightweight cooperative robots that sort the bottles back into the right crates. ABB's role so far is further down the chain. At a Burrtec plant in California, NRT installed 23 ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker robots that pick items off a recycling belt, which we covered in our post on FlexPickers in curbside recycling plants.

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker robots picking chocolate balls at Delicato. Photo: ABB

Where bottle returns and their robots go next

For households the trend is more return points, closer to home. Small machines like the B3 let corner shops take bottles and cans without giving up shelf space, and the higher fee for automated returns gives them a reason to buy one. The machines still have to read every container. On 1 October a shopper in Singapore complained that a supermarket's own sticker covered the deposit barcode on some cans, so the machines would not accept them. Crushed, dirty or label-less containers are still rejected for the same reason.

A bottle reverse vending machine in a Rewe supermarket in Krefeld, Germany, 2024. Photo: Alexis Jazz / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

In the counting centres and bottling plants behind the shops, ABB robots could fit as a possibility. An IRB 360 FlexPicker with PickMaster software could pick returned bottles off a conveyor by brand or colour, the job it already does in recycling plants. A GoFa CRB 15000 cobot could sort reusable bottles into crates next to workers, much like the KORINS lightweight robots, and IRB 460 or IRB 660 palletizers could stack the full crates. A cell like that would be laid out and tested first in RobotStudio, with conveyor tracking for the moving bottles.

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 cobot at a work table. Photo: ABB

The open problems are cost, safety and skills. A counting centre handles millions of containers in many shapes, so a picking robot has to be fast and almost never wrong, and broken glass is hard on grippers. Cobots that work beside people need speed and force limits or SafeMove zones. The staff also change jobs, from sorting bottles by hand to cleaning cameras, clearing jams and checking the data the machines report. With the UK scheme due in October 2027 and Singapore's now running in full, both will send more containers through these machines and the plants behind them.

An ABB four axis palletizing robot with a layer gripper in a packaging line cell. Photo: ABB

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