Recycling of aluminium-developing design criteria for aluminium cans compressor

Abstract

Aluminium used in beverage containers or cans is a sustainable material and can be recycled repeatedly. In Malaysia, the activities of collecting aluminium beverage cans for recycle normally involve a process of compressing aluminium cans manually in order to reduce storage space. The cans compression process is very time consuming and unproductive. In addition, there is no standard aluminium cans compressor tool that available in the market currently. As such, this paper aims to identify users' requirements on the potential tool that could be used to compress aluminium beverage cans, follows by transform the important users' requirements to a set of design criteria for the development of aluminium cans compressor. In line with this, six important factors that influence users purchase decision on household product were identified from literature review. The important factors were adapted into a questionnaire to collect and identify users preferred requirements on aluminium cans compressor via Voice of Customer technique. Subsequently, Pareto analysis and t-test were applied to define the most important and significant users' requirements that influenced user purchase decision. As a result, a list of important users' requirements is generated, which is also served as the design criteria for the development of a new aluminium cans compressor. Finding from the paper suggested that the most important design criteria for the potential aluminium cans compressor are consisted of safety, cost, performance and reliability requirements.