Laser sensing technology that can distinguish between six different kinds of plastics

Laser sensing technology that can distinguish between six different kinds of plastics has been jointly developed by IDEC (European office: Hamburg / Germany; www.idec.com) and PARC (the Photonics Advanced Research Center at Osaka University / Japan).

The optical technology, which uses reflections from lasers of five different wavelengths, has been combined with robot technology from Mitsubishi Electric Engineering (MEE, Tokyo / Japan; www.mitsubishi.com) to develop what is claimed to be the first plastics sorting robot. The machine can sort PE and PP, which are not distinguishable by the human eye.