A low-cost LIBS detection system combined with chemometrics for rapid identification of plastic waste.

We present, rapid and efficient identification of ten different types of post-consumer plastics obtained from a local recycling unit by deploying a low cost, compact CCD spectrometer in laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) technique. For this investigation, spectral emissions were collected by an Echelle spectrograph equipped with an intensified charge-coupled device (ES-ICCD) as well as a non-gated Czerny Turner CCD spectrometer (NCT-CCD). The performance is evaluated by interrogating the samples in a single-shot as well as accumulation mode (ten consecutive laser shots). The results from principal component analysis (PCA) have shown excellent discrimination. Further, the artificial neural network (ANN) analysis has demonstrated that individual identification accuracies/rates up to ~99 % can be achieved. The data acquired with ES-ICCD in the accumulation of ten shots have shown average identification accuracies ~97 %. Nevertheless, similar performance is achieved with the NCT-CCD spectrometer even in a single shot acquisition which reduces the overall analysis time by a factor of ~15 times compared to the ES-ICCD. Furthermore, the detector/collection system size, weight, and cost also can be reduced by ~10 times by employing a NCT-CCD spectrometer. The results have the potential in realizing a compact and low-cost LIBS system for the rapid identification of plastics with higher accuracies for the real-time application.