Compostable plastics, which are engineered to biodegrade under controlled conditions, have been increasing in popularity in recent years, but often look identical to conventional plastics and therefore get recycled incorrectly.
Conventional plastic samples included PP and PET, often used for food containers and drinking bottles, as well as LDPE which is often used for plastic bags and packaging.
Compostable plastic samples included PLA and PBAT, used for cup lids, tea bags and magazine wraps, as well as palm-leaf and sugarcane, both biomass-derived materials used to produce packaging.
The samples were divided into a training set, used to build classification models, and a testing set, used to check accuracy. The researchers worked with different types of plastics measuring between 50mm by 50mm and 5mm by 5mm.
The model achieved perfect accuracy for all materials when the samples measured more than 10mm by 10mm. For sugarcane-derived or palm leaf-based...