Life is Plastic? Detecting the Presence of Micro-Plastics in Food and Drink Containers

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.