SMART WASTE MANAGEMENT

'Where do I throw this garbage' is a question that many citizens ask themselves. The same happens also in waste sorting centres, where smart waste management is becoming increasingly necessary with the development of new waste streams (think textiles or aggregates), new sorting requirements (e.g. food and non-food PET), regulations, transparency monitoring of waste supply chain to avoid illegalities, the demand for ever higher quality in the secondary raw material.

Smart waste management employs sensors of all kinds (optical, magnetic, lidar, etc.), intelligent monitoring systems, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things and mobile applications. For example, sensors can measure the fill level of containers and provide up-to-date information at any time and notify waste management services to empty them when they are full or nearly full; artificial intelligence enhances sorting systems, recognising the types of materials; apps help in urban and industrial waste management, helping citizens and businesses. These are the building block of data-driven waste management ecosystem. According to Mikela Druckman, co-founder of Greyparrot, a US-based waste analytics company, “only a small percentage of treated waste is measured and examined qualitatively. This made us realise the opportunity to digitise and build the leading waste intelligence platform”.

Time to see what smart waste management technologies are increasingly emerging in Europe and beyond. And how they will revolutionise the waste sector.

SMART COLLECTION, A GOAL FOR ALL

Most waste collection systems in use today are manual and poorly managed: they often make unnecessary or late collections. Unnecessary pick-ups alone increase annual collection costs by up to 70%. In addition, frequent route congestion, often due to inefficient route planning, also increases the volume of petrol consumed to make collections. Hence, the entire process contributes to increasing the carbon footprint by 50%.

Assuming that efforts have already been made to reduce the overall proportion of waste to be delivered, perhaps by carrying out a company waste audit or downloading an app such as Junker or To Good to Go, to optimise the quality of waste sorting, collection today has ample room for improvement.

For example, sensors can be used to monitor the fill level of industrial bins and skips (Waste Fill-Level Tracking) to enhance collection. Companies such as Indevo, Pello, Adambì, and many others have developed systems that monitor fill levels and location and provide real time information to the company or collection company, which is very useful when combined with industrial or communal compactors (but more incentives would be needed for domestic, manual or smart compactors). Having filling level information at hand makes it possible to optimise waste management practices and create, thanks to neural networks and network analysis, optimised collection systems.

An innovation that some countries and municipalities are adopting to completely replace the transport of waste by road are Pneumatic Waste Pipes, pneumatic tubes that can be installed under public waste containers to transport waste directly to treatment centres without the need to collect the rubbish. This system has two main advantages. First, it can drastically reduce the number of rubbish trucks on the roads, especially in densely populated and busy cities, again helping to reduce harmful emissions and minimise the number of vehicles on the road. Secondly, sending waste directly from the bins to waste management centres can help to avoid vandalism (we have all witnessed the havoc seagulls wreak on rubbish bags in the streets of Rome). The disadvantage? They require long and complex construction sites in urban areas.

KIOSKS AND SMART COLLECTION POINTS

The collection of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE), in Italy as in other EU countries, remains complex, limited to ecological islands or to points of sale which are often not sufficiently equipped to collect WEEE. A solution could come from dedicated kiosks, specialised in electronic waste recycling. An innovative project comes from the start-up EcoATM. Its kiosks make it easy and safe to dispose of unwanted electronic devices. If your phone, tablet or computer is still in good condition, they can even give you money in exchange for the item, rewarding your efforts and helping to increase e-waste recycling rates.

EcoATM kiosks are a class of Reverse Vending Machines (RVMs), devices that accept empty glass, plastic or can bottles (but are increasingly available for packaging, clothes, etc.) and return money or coupons to the user (i.e. the reverse of the typical sales cycle). RVMs are most prevalent in countries with legislation concerning returnable empties and are often placed in supermarkets or shopping centres. The main manufacturers of RVMs are Norway's Tomra, Germany's Wincor Nixdorf, the US Envipco, Australia's Envirobank and the UK's Reverse Vending Corporation. In addition to collecting packaging, they can store imported data on user behaviour and consumption, which can be resold to companies.

SORTING

"For the first time, with our GAINnext system we can quickly, efficiently and on a large scale sort food-grade plastic from non-food-grade plastic for PET, PP and HDPE," Volker Rehrmann, VP and Head of Recycling at Tomra, tells the author. This is one of the latest major innovations in sorting, made possible thanks to the intensive research and development of many companies in the field of deep learning, a branch of Artificial Intelligence.

Today, technologies such as GAINnext are able to distinguish complex objects and PET packaging of different colours (impossible to differentiate with traditional optical sensors), processing up to 60 kg of waste per minute (with an error of less than 10%) and continuing to learn new behaviours when new packaging formats arise.

This type of innovation will increasingly extend to a variety of waste streams, e.g. by reducing the proportion of material categorised as contaminated or improper, or by creating new streams, especially in those countries where there are very few recycling plants, where separate collection becomes superfluous, as plants will soon be able to separate every material (except organic waste, which for obvious reasons must be processed separately). In the United States, where sorting does not have the quality and quantity that it has in Europe, the wasteplant giant Bollegraaf, together with Greyparrot, is planning to equip thousands of material recovery plants with rubbish detection tools. Bollegraaf has already built thousands of smart plants, including 340 in North America.

TRACEABILITY

In general, by 'traceability system' we mean a system that makes it possible to identify and trace all the information and components involved in an end-of-life management process of a product or material, from its disposal to its subsequent processing, transformation and marketing, trying to avoid illicit trade or substandard disposal and preserving the quality of the waste. Not only that: traceability systems also make it possible to collect valuable data for the analysis and improvement of management and collection processes, explains Plastisac of Mantua.

Traceability can be ensured by barcode or QR Code applied directly to bags or containers equipped with RFID tags, (an acronym for Radio Frequency Identification). RFID is one of the most widely used systems for traceability in smart waste management. Thanks to this technology, in fact, it is possible to store data on tags or transponders, which can be read or written by specific radio frequency readers.

Italy has launched the new National Electronic Register for Waste Traceability or RENTRi, created by the Ministry of the Environment to digitise documents relating for waste transportation and ensure greater transparency. The system will be in force from 15 December, when the old registers and forms will be repealed, and by the same date transporters of hazardous waste will have to ensure the presence of geolocation systems on their vehicles as a requirement of suitability. A system that will hopefully soon become standard throughout Europe. Transparency, localisation, secure and interoperable data are the foundations of the breakthrough towards universal smart waste management that will increasingly contribute to a global circular economy.

Article by Emanuele Bompan