Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com March 14 news, food bags, coffee cups, plastic bags. Plastic can be seen everywhere in our daily life. In recent years, with the guidance of national policies and the improvement of residents' awareness of environmental protection, more and more people begin to use biodegradable plastic products.

Image source: the Unsplash / CC0 public domain is only between these degradable plastics and traditional plastics, it is difficult to make an effective distinction in appearance, if not done well in the recycling process, it may pollute the recycling of plastics and reduce efficiency.

In a paper published on Frontiers in Sustainability, researchers at University College London (UCL) used machine learning to automatically classify different types of compostable and biodegradable plastics and distinguish them from traditional plastics.

Professor Mark Miodownik, the study's newsletter author, said: "the accuracy is so high that the technology can be used in industrial recycling and composting facilities in the future."

CTOnews.com learned from the report that the researchers used artificial intelligence to classify plastic materials between 5mm times 5mm and 50mm times 50mm.

The traditional plastics tested in this test are mainly made of PP and PET (mainly used for food containers and beverage bottles); compostable and biodegradable plastic samples are mainly made of PLA and PBAT for cup lid, tea bag and magazine packaging.

The results show that the success rate is very high: when the measured value of the sample is more than 10 mm x 10 mm, the model achieves perfect accuracy for all materials. However, for sugarcane derived materials or palm leaf materials with a size of 10 mm x 10 mm or less, the misclassification rates were 20% and 40%, respectively.

Looking at fragments with the size of 5mm x 5mm, the identification of some materials is more reliable than others: for LDPE and PBAT fragments, the misclassification rate is 20%; the error recognition rates of the two biomass-derived materials are 60% (sugar cane) and 80% (palm leaves), respectively.

Paper address: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frsus.2023.1125954/full

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