A smart garbage recycling machine, the first of its kind in Ningbo, East China's Zhejiang province, is put into use on April 28. [Photo/Ningbo Evening News] 

A smart garbage recycling machine, the first of its kind in Ningbo, East China's Zhejiang province, was put into use on April 28.

The machine is currently on a trial operation in Wan'an residential community, which is situated in the city's Haishu district.

Residents are required to dispose of their garbage in a classified manner after scanning their faces, swiping cards, or scanning codes to operate the machine, which will automatically break the garbage bags. 

Its operation has removed time constraints, as residents in the past were required to dump their garbage at designated times.

In the near future, the machine will be capable of weighing the content and identifying those who infringe on the regulations by using facial recognition and AI technologies, according to Wang Huihui, deputy head of the Ningbo municipal household waste classification instruction center.

This year, the city plans to launch 1,000 smart garbage recycling machines.

The launch of these machines comes as part of a project supported by the World Bank to promote urban household waste collection and recycling in Ningbo, which kicked off in July 2013.

The city aims to put the machines in 2,500 communities within its jurisdiction in three to five years, with the goals of lifting the garbage classification precision rate to 80 percent and the recycling rate in its urban area to 60 percent.

In 2020, Ningbo was rated as excellent in garbage sorting promotion by the provincial government, as well as ranked among the top three out of 46 key cities that were included in the nation's pilot program for garbage classification.