How can I tell if something is contaminated with plastic?
Answer:
This is because of the nature of plastics. Plastic can be any one of a dozen or so different chemical substances, so any detection system would have to detect them all. In fact, most plastics are more or less chemically inert. Moreover, plastics are "polymers"; huge molecules that only dissolve in specialized solvents very slowly, if at all. Since plastics are organic chemicals, it would be difficult to pick them out spectroscopically.
The good news is that plastics are not toxic, at least in the normal sense of the word. If swallowed, plastic will pass through the gut unchanged. The bigger nuisance is chewing on some food and biting a small piece of plastic.
Off the top of my head, I would think some physical means of detection rather than chemical means would be in order. Things would be a lot easier if you have an idea of which plastic it is that you are trying to detect; that shouldn't be too hard. If you pull a sample of a processed breakfast cereal, for example, and crush it, the plastic would resist. If your food is of high density and the plastic lower density, mixing a blended sample in a carefully chosen solvent will cause the contaminant to float. Just an idea or two.
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