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This is a great comment. > 4. Force companies to color their containers according to plastic type. I.e no more clear Pepsi or Coke bottles - all PE products ar
by justinpombrio 6y ago
This is a great comment.
> 4. Force companies to color their containers according to plastic type. I.e no more clear Pepsi or Coke bottles - all PE products are color, say green. All PP colors are red, etc.
Humans don't have to sort the plastics, machines could. Is there a machine-readable but human-invisible marking we could give them? Like coloring them in a way that would be distinctive under a UV camera or UV light?
- lupire 6y agoIf it's transparent, you've lost "color" control. But maybe some kind of radar/sonar-type response signature could work
- throwmtlsPhD 6y agoIt can be transparent in the visible spectrum. But ya, the UV dyes are probably not very stable
- spreadsheetuser 6y agoIn my not-so-professional opinion, IR and Raman spectrography could give us something. Or density, depending on how selectively the industrialized mechanical processes are at resolving small changes in physical properties.
- Dolores12 6y agoRFID chip maybe?
- labawi 6y agoConvert plastic waste into e-waste?
- efreak 6y agoFrom Wikipedia: > Hitachi holds the record for the smallest RFID chip, at 0.05 mm × 0.05 mm......These dust-sized chips can store 38-digit numbers using 128-bit Read Only Memory (ROM). A major challenge is the attachment of antennas, thus limiting read range to only millimeters. Sounds to me like RFID chips can be small enough to not worry about. Even at 1mm^3, you can likely just let it fall out while melting down plastic, and collect it later. Not that I'm advocating for doing so, I think enforcing a visible symbol indicating the contents is a far better idea.