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You’ve likely faced this dilemma: holding a plastic item and wondering whether it’s recyclable or should be tossed in the trash. You are not alone. Not only consumers but also professional recyclers are confronted with this challenge. Despite being widely promoted since at least the ‘70s, recycling remains a complicated process. This uncertainty has resulted in an extreme excess of plastic waste—most of which could have been reused.
In fact, only nine percent of plastic waste is recycled globally. The swelling tide of plastic from packaging, consumer goods, and disposable items continues to challenge our existing recycling infrastructure—with many regions globally lacking access to it altogether. And yet, the supply of recyclable plastics can’t meet the demand set by brands that need them to meet their environmental and packaging targets. To effectively address this imbalance, recycling capture rates would need to increase significantly. Yet, the challenge of determining whether a plastic item is recyclable leads to many being wrongly thrown away.
How Recycling Works
You probably already have a broad knowledge of how recycling works. This involves collecting waste materials, sorting them by type, and processing them into new raw materials.
Making the recycling process efficient, however, mostly hinges on how quickly and effectively the different materials can be sorted. For plastics, this includes materials made out of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which is used to package many of the drinks you know, and high-density polyethylene (HDPE), which many items—including toys, plastic bags, and shampoo bottles—are made of.
“Sorting plastics is essential for recycling because not all plastics are built alike,” says Brian Schmatz, the senior manager of business development and sales for trinamiX North America—a tech company developing material sensing solutions, which is owned by the world’s leading chemical company BASF. “If you were to empty your blue bin, you’d probably find six different types of plastics, which all need to be segmented so they can be brought back into new materials. If you were to blend them all together, you would get a poor quality material that would have no functional application.”
To sort these materials effectively can be very costly, as it requires specific infrastructure and machinery. An industrial sorter, which is vital for large-scale recycling, uses near-infrared spectroscopy (NIR) to determine the plastic composition of the waste material being analyzed.
It costs over $500,000—and requires dedicated space and assembly line equipment in order to run, making it impractical for many regions that handle the bulk of the world's waste.
"At trinamiX, we've been driving innovations in NIR spectroscopy with the mission of making this powerful technology available to everyone," says Brian Schmatz. "Technological breakthroughs have already led to significantly lowering the barriers to reliable plastics identification and expanding access beyond industrial sorters."
The ingenuity of a small team within BASF's research group led to the founding of trinamiX in 2015. Since then, the corporate tech spin-off evolved into an enterprise employing more than 240 dedicated specialists in areas like software development, machine learning, sensor production, engineering, sales, business development, and more around the world.
“Being part of BASF, we had a very close tie to the plastics industry and access to plastics data,” Schmatz says. “It allowed us to put together a robust application and quickly reach this market to make an impact.”
How trinamiX’s PAL One Device Can Help
To help decentralize the plastics-identifying process, trinamiX has been working to mobilize NIR spectroscopy technology. Its PAL (Portable Analytical Lab) One device and accompanying app offer a new approach to the recycling conundrum, using what Schmatz terms “spectroscopy as a service.”
Leveraging the same NIR spectroscopy technology as industrial sorting machines, trinamiX PAL One is a portable device that fits in your palm—enabling on-the-go identification of plastic types, thus complementing large-scale facilities to expand the reach of plastic sortation. It works by placing the sensor of the device on the item you want to identify and pushing a button. Then, the app shows the material of the item based on the data it collects.
Starting at $1,500 a year, depending on the subscription package chosen, the device’s user is able to select different datasets from the trinamiX database depending on their needs. This affordable price point makes the PAL One accessible to a wider range of users, from community recycling efforts to small businesses that also want to do their part.
The PAL One is already being used by community and non-government organizations to make waste collection efforts more efficient. The Ocean Plastic Recovery Project, which focuses on collecting plastic waste from the remote coastlines of Alaska, uses the device to classify collected plastics and sort them onboard. Similarly, the Ghana Recycling Project is using the PAL One to educate local plastic collectors and help them make money from their plastic waste.
“If you just collect mixed plastic waste, it's not something highly sellable,” Schmatz says. “But if you separate everything into, for example, polypropylene or polyethylene, then you have a valuable commodity.
“The PAL One solution is providing these small recyclers and collection communities with viable economic output, versus simply doing all this collection work and then giving the recovered plastics away to someone else to sort and make money off of it. They can sell the raw material product and profit themselves.”
Some of these local initiatives also do more than tackle the immediate recycling issue. Net Your Problem—a program in the Pacific Northwest that recovers discarded fishing nets— is facilitating the circularity of plastics by sending its sorted streams of nylon to trinamiX’s parent company BASF, converting the waste product back into valuable resources.
With the increasing plastic pollution challenge, on-the-ground and accessible solutions can be part of the solution. The PAL One device's ability to classify plastics on-site, without shipping them to larger facilities for identification, not only speeds up the recycling process but also adds value to the collected waste. A localized approach to waste management, powered by handheld technology, might be a key strategy in the battle against plastic waste.
As the world grapples with the challenge of waste management, innovative technologies like trinamiX’s handheld spectrometer are a step in the right direction. Driving more widespread awareness, adoption, and support of this solution among major industry players promises to deliver a lasting impact. Check out trinamiX NIR technology here.
This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for BASF.
