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It would be great to sample plastic and get composition sufficient to determine a recycling category
by dv_dt 2y ago
It would be great to sample plastic and get composition sufficient to determine a recycling category
- bluGill 2y agoWe already do that. However not all plastics and be determined that way. Black plastic in particular often cannot be figured out (since the laser as absorbed) and so even if the plastic is easy to recycle it is often land filled. There are open questions on if recycling plastic is worth bothering with at all, but that is a different debate.
- whatshisface 2y agoIf you zapped it you'd have vapor to analyze.
- aj7 2y agoOne time at the laser show, the booth across from us had a methane analyzer. You could tell when people farted.
- throwup238 2y agoSimple hand held methane detectors have been around for a few decades. This was used to great effect in the Kenny VS Spenny episode, Who Can Blow the Biggest Fart: https://youtu.be/ash2NzL1IHo https://youtu.be/ash2NzL1IHo (It’s a Canadian show)
- colechristensen 2y agoI prefer the trash to electricity route. If you think about it, the oil just took a detour into being a water bottle or whatever for a little while on it's way to the power plant. I really can't imagine we'll be at 0 hydrocarbon electricity grid any decade soon and burning garbage (and instead of "recycling" plastic) seems to be a perfectly reasonable thing to do if you can do it cleanly in a power plant.
- Animats 2y ago> We already do that Here's the machinery doing it.[1] It's just using RGB and IR cameras; they're not using lasers to vaporize samples and analyze the spectrum. That would be both overkill and a fire hazard. Overview of modern waste handling.[2] Most of the separation is entirely mechanical, with screens, vibrators, rotating drums, and air blasts. But HDPE and PET plastics are separated using infrared sensing. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51S3ET7M138 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51S3ET7M138 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rkHt34AztY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rkHt34AztY
- jfim 2y agoOooh, so that's why the local recycling facility doesn't take black plastics. Thanks for sharing!
- dv_dt 2y agoThats good to know. On recycling or not, i dont think it will ever be a universal yes or no. But if the tech was there to reliably identify & pull out a processable stream that has concrete assessable value. Its probsbly a harder requirement on some sensing tech to do it with continuously on an industrialized stream of refuse.
- LoganDark 2y ago> Black plastic in particular often cannot be figured out (since the laser as absorbed) Is it not possible to make a very thin slice of it for analysis?
- TuringNYC 2y ago>> It would be great to sample plastic and get composition sufficient to determine a recycling category i love this idea. i cant believe how tiny the marked recycling categories are on the containers, i can barely see them. i always wondered how they even achieve this at the town recycling center.
- colechristensen 2y ago>how they even achieve this at the town recycling center They don't. A huge proportion is never recycled at all.
- klysm 2y agoPlastic generally isn’t recycled that much, and many kinds of plastic cannot sustainably be recycled. There’s a lot of automation in the space, and none of it uses the markers
- ianburrell 2y agoThe marks on plastic aren't recycling categories, they identify the plastic resin. They partially indicate recyclability but the form is important. I don't think they are used at recycling centers which mostly go on common shapes. Products are supposed to now use solid triangle to reduce the confusion with recycling.
- klysm 2y agoWe do this already, but also for metals which have a much more reasonable recycling story. In metals though, we use LIBS. Tomra makes the best machines currently