Control of waste fragment sorting process based on MIR imaging coupled with cautious classification

Abstract With the increase in waste streams, industrial sorting has become a major issue. The main challenge is to minimise sorting errors to avoid serious recycling problems and significant quality degradation of the final recycled product. Making use of near infrared (NIR) technology, some industrialists have already designed sorting machines able to discriminate between several types of plastics with good reliability. However, these devices are not suited to dark plastics, which are very common in WEEE (Waste Electronic and Electrical Equipment). In order to overcome this obstacle, mid-wavelength infrared (MIR) technology can be used instead of NIR. Nevertheless, the new spectral range is poorer in terms of wavelength for some plastics of interest ( 2712 − 5274 n m ), which makes the sorting task harder in an industrial context where spectrum identification is subject to imprecision and uncertainty. This article shows the benefit of combining this promising optical technology with a cautious machine learning procedure to optimise recycling. When the information provided by the device regarding a plastic fragment to be sorted is insufficient to discriminate between candidate materials, the proposed procedure, taking advantage of the belief functions theory, blows the fragment into a container dedicated to more than one specific material. This cautious sorting enables the containers dedicated to the specific materials to contain less impurities, which leads to higher-quality secondary raw materials. The proposed sorting procedure is illustrated and compared with a more conventional approach using real industrial data.