Martin De Biasio Recycling materials prevents waste of
potentially useful materials; however, manual sorting is labor
intensive and can cause health problems. These limitations led
to a demand for fully automated waste-sorting technologies based
on machine-vision technologies that can sort tons of waste
material every hour and operate for 24 hours a day. However,
there are certain materials that cannot be discriminated with
sufficient accuracy using standard off-the-shelf vision
components. To properly recycle glass, for example, different
types of glasses must be individually sorted. If not, the
different glass types each with a different melting point will
result in an uncontrolled mixture that when melted will result
in recovered glass that is prone to cracking during cooling.
Raman spectroscopy solution In traditional machine-vision
systems, glass materials may be sorted with visible-light camera
systems or x-ray fluorescence systems. However, visible-light
systems exhibit limited selectivity, and x-ray-b