Don’t Just Throw It: Empowering Society to Recycle Correctly with PERI, the Educational Robot Bin

Peru recycles less than 2% of waste despite high potential. Current solutions fail at two extremes: passive bins cause confusion, while automated bins create dependency. We introduce PERI (Peer Educational Recycling Instructor), a social robot designed not just to sort but to teach. PERI uses a YOLOv8-based vision module to validate user decisions in real-time. This paper demonstrates PERI’s deployment with over 500 interactions. Our results show that 80% of users corrected their sorting mistakes through a combination of PERI’s feedback and facilitator mediation, transforming technical limitations into educational moments and empowering citizens as agents of change.