Bitware Labs/Plastic Fantastic
Identify plastics by how they behave
A pocket identifier for the sorting bench. Answer what you can actually observe and it ranks fourteen polymers by likelihood — instead of marching you down a decision tree where one misread answer ends the run.
How it works
§ 01 — MethodEvery candidate stays in play the whole way through. Nothing is ever eliminated — only made improbable.
Each answer multiplies every polymer's likelihood by how well the observation fits it, and the list re-ranks. Get one test wrong and the true answer drops a few places rather than becoming unreachable; two more observations usually bring it back.
“Don't know” is a real answer. Skip a question and it simply contributes nothing — you are not punished for the tests you cannot run, which outside a laboratory is most of them.
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i.
Free questions firstResin code, then float, drop sound, bend, feel. Heat is a last resort, not an opening move.
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ii.
Evidence is weightedA stamped resin code counts heavily. A vague smell counts a little. Both still count.
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iii.
The runners-up are shownWhen the top two are close, that is the honest state of the evidence — and it tells you whether to run another test.
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iv.
Nothing burns unnecessarilyPVC and PTFE are named from cold observations alone. It will never ask you to set either alight.
Safety, and what it will not do
§ 02 — LimitsBurning PVC releases hydrogen chloride. Burning PTFE above roughly 350 °C releases fluorinated decomposition products, and the resulting polymer-fume fever is well documented and thoroughly unpleasant. Classic identification charts cheerfully tell you to apply a flame and note what happens. That is a bad instruction to hand someone at a sorting bench, so both polymers are identifiable here without heat: PVC sinks and whitens sharply at a bend, PTFE is denser still, waxy and unusually slippery.
What it is: a likelihood ranking from consumer-grade observations. Good enough for sorting, repair, recycling triage, and deciding whether something is safe to machine or heat.
What it is not: spectroscopy. It knows nothing about additives, fillers, plasticisers, flame retardants or regrind content — all of which shift exactly the properties it measures. If a compliance requirement is attached to the answer, this is not the tool, and the app says so itself.
Installing it
§ 03 — SideloadIt is not on Google Play. You download an APK and install it yourself, which means you are right to want to know what you are installing before you do.
What it asks for
No internet permission. Not restricted, not
optional — android.permission.INTERNET is not in the manifest
at all, so the app is structurally incapable of sending anything anywhere.
No analytics, no crash reporting, no update check. It works in a basement
with no signal, and everything you type stays on the handset.
Verify the download
Check it matches before installing:
sha256sum plasticfantastic.apk
2cda135d4c0ef32eb6036bf5ffcb29bcfc686d9d5bf968684b96b88d19f6e0e1
Package com.bitwarelabs.plasticfantastic ·
1.6 MB · published 16 July 2026.
Android will warn you about installing from an unknown source; that warning
is correct and you should only dismiss it for files you have checked.
Found it wrong about something?
Field corrections are genuinely useful — if it confidently misidentifies something you know the answer to, that is a weighting bug worth hearing about. Tell me what it said and what it was.