This was an exercise in creating a RUBE Goldberg machine to recycle a box of tea.  The entire piece got more involved than expected.  It was a study of the use of forces, force fields, connectors, and simulations.  I modeled most of the foreground elements and used the asset browser in Cinema 4D to fill in the background elements and textures.  It was also my first time utilizing the Bake as Alembic feature.  It assisted in shortening my render times.  

Below is the first run, realizing that the simulations were prematurely releasing on the 2nd half of the animation.  

So I rendered the foreground animation with an alpha channel...  

Then duplicated the camera and rendered just the background to composite together in AfterEffects.

The biggest struggle for producing this piece was that, even though I was rendering on 2 different MACs with M1 and M2 processors, the simulations were bogging down the renders.  The timing of the rigid body simulators did not want to wait for the collisions that I intended to initialize the sequence, so I had to get creative on the solve.  My personal goal to create everything on one continuous run was not successful but I learned a great deal about how to set up my simulations for future projects.