Hi Plastic Scanner family,

Here is already our 9th update from our side, the September update!

in the last update, you could see us looking for help, and this is still the case. If you or someone you know has a background in physics, spectroscopy, data processing, or data science this kind of things, let us know, and we will help to get you involved in the project! ideally, someone who can work part-time here in Delft, but we are flexible 🙂. The quicker we have the right people in the right place, the quicker we can bring the Plastic Scanner to you!

Besides that I did visit some very interesting places, and unlocked some of the key resources we were looking for: At the beginning of the month, I visited the Photonics research group of the Hague university of applied sciences. They have a lab full of spectroscopes, and quite amazing optical instruments! They were super friendly and are happy to help with the development of the Plastic Scanner, we can visit them to scan plastics and to get reference spectra!

✅ This basically unlocks our long-desired wish to have access to professional spectroscopes.

Later in the month I also visited the Circular plastics research group of NHL Steden in Leeuwaarden. They focus specifically on the circularity of plastics, and on cleaning and sorting plastics. Just like the other research group they are super supportive and are happy to help with the development of the Plastic Scanner! they can help with knowledge of plastics and the different use cases of the Plastic Scanner.

✅ This also unlocks our long-desired wish to have access to pure reference polymers, so we know that the spectrum we measure is from the plastic and not from any additive.

Lastly, we need to talk about the timeline of the project. At the beginning of the year, we set our goal to make the best possible open source plastic scanner that can identify PP,PE,PS,PET,PVC. But if we look at the roadmap, it can be seen that things are not going as fast as expected. Ideally, we would now have a design and start proper documentation to allow for replication. But we find that there are still too many uncertainties. So even though the year progress bar is still progressing, the development will take longer than 2022.

This is all for this month, hope to see you back next month with new developments!

Yours,  Jerry ✌️