The third edition of the Global Recycling Day held by the BIR (Bureau of International Recycling) took place last March 18th. This day is dedicated to celebrate recycling around the world while raising awareness on its importance in the fight against climate change. Existing since 1994 in the United States, it was taken over in 2018 by the BIR. It now has an international standing given the major issues of recycling. Indeed, recycling is a part of the ecological approach to save the environment and has consequently become essential.

Plastic recycling in particular is necessary. Present as bottles, caps or packaging, it is omnipresent in our daily life and represents a considerable stake. Currently, barely one third of plastic waste is recycled in Europe. This figure comes to only 22% in France1. The vast majority of this waste is being stacked in landfill sites or is spreading in the wild.

However, plastics’ technicity and diversity make it hard to recycle it. Indeed, there are thousands of kinds of plastic, grouped into about thirty classes. Their identification, and thus the optimization of their recycling, is impossible with the naked eye. That’s why there is a need to use advanced methods.

By using Machine Learning tools and vibrational spectroscopy, GreenTropism makes it possible to identify plastic in an easy, reliable and fast way.

Solicited on several issues around these topics (sorting at source, sorting center, polymer identification), GreenTropism conceived real-time plastic resin identification tools. Today, several hundreds of samples are analyzed by GreenTropism’s solutions (on laboratory instruments, processes or miniaturized spectrometers) which made it possible to recycle and value them properly.

GreenTropism keeps bringing its Artificial Intelligence and in Chemometry expertise on spectroscopy and imagery methods, including Near Infrared Spectroscopy and hyperspectral imagery, in order to provide a real-time plastic identification in several areas of deployment. 

Figure : Poymers analyzed on Antaris II (Thermo-Fisher) : HDPE ; LDPE ; PPH ; PET ; PVC