Green DetectIR

Purpose and goal:

Our innovation enables sorting of all plastics. The purpose has been to validate the technological foundation. A first goal was to develop a structural prototype on which an infrared photodetector can be built in the future.

We have now successfully developed such a lab prototype. A second goal was to attempt to integrate infrared photodetector material on the structural prototype. We achieved this second goal as we showed that such material can be integrated with good structural quality on top of the prototype. Expected results and effects:

An important result is that the foundational technology has been validated in a lab prototype. This prototype is now available for customers and investors. This is a critical step in order to fund continued development of a camera to sort all plastics. In the future, this will help create a circular flow where plastic products are recycled indefinitely. According to the EU, the plastics industry accounts for unnecessary CO2 emissions of 400 million tons per year.

Approach and implementation:

The bulk of the project consisted of experimental process development to make the prototype and integrate material on the prototype. The work was conducted at MyFab in Lund and Kista. The process steps were developed in modules of a few steps each for which clear targets were set. This enabled some parallel work on multiple modules, while we could quickly discover flaws in a module and improve and iterate it quickly. The project was completed on time.