Pitch
The numerous types of visually identical but chemically different plastics must be separated and recycled separately. Many developed countries use industrial-scale automatic sorting machines, however their high capital cost and infrastructural requirements prohibit their use in developing countries. Instead, developing countries make use of numerous small manual sorting facilities distributed around the country which are extremely limited by their workers’ ability to visually identify plastics. We have developed a low-cost and small scale plastic identification device which enables operators in material recovery facilities to quickly and reliably identify different types of visually indistinguishable plastics.
