Imagine there is plastic all around you. Every street, every roof, every park is buried under a layer of plastic. With all the plastic in the world, we could easily cover all of the Netherlands under a layer of plastic. So an awful lot of plastic. Of all that plastic we recycle only a small part. For example, only one new shampoo bottle is made from twenty shampoo bottles. Nine shampoo bottles become a roadside post and eventually the rest is burned. All in all, we recycle only two percent of our plastic really well.

That's because there are an enormous number of types of plastic. If you want to recycle properly, you can't mix all those types of plastic. That's why we are developing a scanning and analysis technique to tell exactly what types of plastic are in the waste. With this, the recycling industry can better ensure that one plastic is not mixed with another. That way, we'll keep less waste and more new usable plastics.