Spectral barcode label for fighting illegal waste dumps

Abstract

Illegal waste dumping is one of the biggest problem in environment protection. Shipments of waste are left in wastelands, forests or dumped into the sea. These activities are difficult to suppress because technologies available to track the waste, and hence the people responsible, are very limited.(1) This research focuses on developing an effective, low-cost way of labelling and detecting bulk waste material shipments. The technology is based on an easily retrievable material in the form of micro/nano magnets which are used as carrier for the spectral signal transducers (e.g. dyes and pigments). These pigment carrying magnetic particles are chemically and physically stable, can form unique spectral pattern to use as identifier tag. The project is divided into two parts: (i) the modification of the magnet particles with various dyes and pigments to form spectral codes (ii) the development of analytical technique for code readou