Waste Analytics

  • The project
  • The advantages
  • The results

The project

A technological project to automate waste tracking in facilities

A crucial aspect of our business is the development of the circular economy. As a fundamental part of the ecological transition, it allows us to recover the greatest possible value from waste material, eliminating the need for landfills. One the objectives that we set in our 2021-2030 Business Plan is the disposal of 99.7% of waste by transforming it into materials and energy. In order to strengthen this commitment, we work constantly to find innovative solutions that will enable us to optimize the performance of our materials recovery facilities located throughout Italy.

 

Among the technologies that we are trialling, the solution developed by the Greyparrot start-up is allowing us to test the use of new hardware and software for the automatic tracking of waste material flows in transit through our plastic sorting plants.
Inside these dedicated plants – besides those for the sorting of paper – it is necessary to carry out frequent material analysis to ascertain new opportunities for recovery and possible optimization of the plant itself. At present, such analysis is carried out manually by plant staff in the form of spot checks at variable intervals over a period of time. This method does not, however, make it possible to always understand what is happening inside the plant, with a subsequent loss of value of material that is not properly intercepted by the sorting technology.

 

With the Waste Analytics system, we can perform real-time analysis of materials in transit on the conveyor belts inside our facilities, with the aim of increasing our knowledge of how the facility functions and improve its efficiency

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The advantages

Optimizing facility performance to get the most value from material in transit

Waste Analytics technology offers numerous benefits, mainly in the following areas:

Automated uninterrupted monitoring

The waste flows in transit along a facility’s sorting lines are constantly checked, reducing the need for manual material analysis.

Increase in our knowledge of materials

The project guarantees greater visibility of materials moving through the facility, helping ensure efficiency in the sorting processes. The capability of intercepting and exploitating greater quantities of material can, in time, bring higher revenue.

Risk reduction

The risk associated to possible penalties applied by the COREPLA consortium as a result of failure to meet the required purity levels of material flows (eg. PET, polypropylene, etc.) will decrease.

Possible integration with other systems

With cognitive artificial intelligence and application programming interfaces (APIs), the machinery already used in facilities could be integrated with the new software and hardware technologies.

Input correlation

Particularly between different compositions and some specific factors such as the seasons of the year and sorting staff changes.

The results

Accuracy of results that enables continuous monitoring of waste flows

Currently, we are applying this technology to a PET sorting line at the plastic recovery facility at Muggiano, in the outskirts of Milan. The system is made up of a series of cameras, a computer vision model based on artificial intelligence and a platform that manages and shares the data acquired during monitoring.
The result has been a success: the software demonstrated its ability to provide very precise data, keeping error in recognition of different types of material in transit below 3%. Moreover, it showed that it was able to monitor the composition of the flow over different timescales – from month to minutes – thus highlighting the importance of non-stop monitoring and providing different levels of insight.
Given the accuracy of artificial intelligence, we have decided to extend this technology to more of our facilities so as to deliver greater benefits for the environment and for the communities that we serve.

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