Most common way is to use two coils of wire. They must be isolated and work like transformer. Feed first coil with some small AC voltage, measure feedback from second coil. Once you put some metal object near coils you will have a change in second coil output. Size of coils, number of turns, voltage, sensitivity etc - will all depend on your existing factory equipment, how it is possible to put them near the transporter belt etc, needs some prototyping, tuning and measurement. There are a lot of existing sensors though...