Comment by howmayiannoyyou

This is already being done at an industrial scale in MRFs using robotic systems from various industry vendors, including AMP Robotics (www.amprobotics.com, Alan Ross Machinery (www.alanross.biz) and ZenRobotics (www.zenrobotics.com). This makes pretty good sense at an industrial scale, but probably not much economic sense at an office scale given the low incremental value of the recyclables. That said, recycling & waste processing is among the most dangerous jobs and there are good safety arguments for using this tech in lower volume applications, though probably still not office waste.