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A comment on 50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists to Blame Fat (2016). Parent comment

Re:50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists to B... by justinpombrio on Saturday February 13, 2021 @07:01PM (#26128296)
This is a great comment.

> 4. Force companies to color their containers according to plastic type. I.e no more clear Pepsi or Coke bottles - all PE products are color, say green. All PP colors are red, etc.

Humans don't have to sort the plastics, machines could. Is there a machine-readable but human-invisible marking we could give them? Like coloring them in a way that would be distinctive under a UV camera or UV light?

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Re:50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists to B... by spreadsheetuser on Saturday February 13, 2021 @11:56PM (#26129808)
In my not-so-professional opinion, IR and Raman spectrography could give us something. Or density, depending on how selectively the industrialized mechanical processes are at resolving small changes in physical properties.
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Re:50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists to B... by Dolores12 on Sunday February 14, 2021 @12:01AM (#26129833)
RFID chip maybe?
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Re:50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists to B... by labawi on Sunday February 14, 2021 @04:41AM (#26130904)
Convert plastic waste into e-waste?
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Re:50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists to B... by efreak on Sunday February 14, 2021 @06:14AM (#26131358)
From Wikipedia:

> Hitachi holds the record for the smallest RFID chip, at 0.05 mm × 0.05 mm......These dust-sized chips can store 38-digit numbers using 128-bit Read Only Memory (ROM). A major challenge is the attachment of antennas, thus limiting read range to only millimeters.

Sounds to me like RFID chips can be small enough to not worry about. Even at 1mm^3, you can likely just let it fall out while melting down plastic, and collect it later. Not that I'm advocating for doing so, I think enforcing a visible symbol indicating the contents is a far better idea.

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Re:50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists to B... by lupire on Saturday February 13, 2021 @07:24PM (#26128446)
If it's transparent, you've lost "color" control. But maybe some kind of radar/sonar-type response signature could work
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Re:50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists to B... by throwmtlsPhD on Saturday February 13, 2021 @07:44PM (#26128560)
It can be transparent in the visible spectrum.

But ya, the UV dyes are probably not very stable

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