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Life is Plastic? Detecting the Presence of Micro-Plastics in Food and Drink Containers
Summary
Researchers developed a novel wearable optical sensing system to detect the presence of microplastics in food and drink containers. The study highlights that humans may ingest significant quantities of microplastic fragments weekly, and demonstrates a low-cost approach using micro-controllers and signal processing for real-time microplastic detection.
What we eat and drink has a significant impact on our health. Unfortunately, anything we eat and drink increasingly contains micro-plastics, tiny fragments of plastic material that result from erosion of plastic objects. Indeed, estimates suggest that humans can ingest up to a credit card worth of micro-plastics each week. We contribute a novel wearable system for detecting the presence of micro-plastics in food and drink containers using optical sensing, low-cost micro-controllers, and signal processing techniques that analyze the contents of the containers. We validate our approach through benchmarks using different plastic materials and concentrations, demonstrating that our approach can identify micro-plastics with over 91% accuracy and classify the type of plastic with over 88% accuracy. Our solution offers an innovative yet low-cost pervasive sensing method for improving food safety and detecting containers that are dangerous to use or otherwise faulty.