A look at how one organization is employing intelligent automation to innovate trash management in the circular economy.
Almost every inch of Planet Earth is covered with garbage in the opening sequence of Pixar’s WALL-E. Humans can no longer live in the world, and only the robot WALL-E survives, rolling amid the mountains of waste, sorting each piece although it’s simply too much for one little robot.
Every day, the global population is expected to generate over 5.5 million tons of municipal waste – roughly the weight of the Great Pyramid of Giza. We are essentially burying ourselves in rubbish at this rate. In an ideal world, the obvious remedy could just be to stop manufacturing so much in the first place. It’s much easier said than done. Circular economy models, on the other hand, present smart examples and approachable beginning points for how we may prevent a trashy future.
A circular economy is fundamentally a production and consumption model that benefits businesses, people, and the environment by maximizing the use and minimizing waste from the things we use. Look to nature for an example of a perfect circular economy. A plant grows, an animal nearby feeds on it, and both eventually die and nourish the flora and fauna that formerly supported them.
Humans are more likely to engage in a more linear “make-take-waste” cycle. We create things, buy and use them, and then discard them. If only plastic bags, diapers, and obsolete laptops disintegrated as quickly as fall leaves and fed the soil in the process.
Circular economic activities can provide major advantages to organizations and governments, such as enhancing raw material supply security, interacting, boosting economic growth, and creating jobs.
According to a recent IBM Institute for Business Value study, chief supply chain officers (CSCOs) have identified many particular measures they intend to take over the next three years to achieve their circular economy goals:
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Organizations are automating activities with environmental impact and creativity in mind to progress toward circularity. Trash management organizations, in particular, have the chance to use artificial intelligence (AI) and automation technology to reduce landfill waste.
Hera S.p.A., Italy’s largest waste management, and recycling business are on the front lines of the urgent need to decrease waste and reduce environmental damage as a provider of power, water cycle management, and heating services.
Whereas typical recycling procedures may constitute one arc in the reuse cycle, Hera provides comprehensive solutions to help complete the circle. For example, plastics, not only recover waste but also incorporate it into the manufacturing of high-quality new products that are recyclable.
“Today, in our territories, most of the waste is recovered… only a small portion ends up burnt, but this is burnt in waste-to-energy plants, producing new energy.” — Andrea Bonetti, Hera’s manager of IT architecture
However, the recovery process is dependent on promptly locating and isolating reusable material from masses of garbage. With this procedure in mind, Bonetti and her colleague, Milena Zappoli, Innovation Manager of the Hera Group’s Environmental Services, intended to examine how intelligent automation may enhance productivity and assist in channeling more material to new uses.
Hera employees manually evaluate garbage. Spotters check for recoverable materials, such as plastics, glass, aluminum, and organic material, as trucks unload at the plants’ entrances and waste is pushed toward conveyors, and help coordinate downstream sorting.
It’s a difficult job, especially on such a large scale: 1,400 spotters operate at 89 factories that treat 6.3 million tons of waste each year. And spotters had to deal with a lot of inefficiencies: if a sorting error happens during the collection phase of the waste management process, the entire facility is shut down.
Hera envisioned videotaping incoming waste and utilizing artificial intelligence to recognize characteristics of things and materials that would qualify them for recovery and reuse. “This might have a significant impact on the costs of recovery and disposal activities, which are at the center of the circular economy,” Bonetti says.
The Hera and IBM Garage teams immediately realized that the plants were not the best location for video capturing. There was far too much information going by at an alarming rate. Instead, they discovered a superior vantage point further upstream. They may record the little amounts of debris falling out of bins by installing cameras on trash trucks. “It’s still an exceedingly fast succession of images,” Bonetti explains. “However, the analysis of these photos has enabled us to find significant trends for the qualitative evaluation of garbage during the collection phase, rather than inside the plant, which might save the time and expense of the transformation process.”
The Hera team also intends to correlate waste-quality data with collection locations, which will allow the company to build targeted education campaigns to assist people to distinguish between waste products.
“The experience with IBM Garage has allowed us to activate a particularly innovative solution in the field of waste collection, selection, and recovery: the project is positioned along the entire operational supply chain and can be a valid support to increase efficiency, but above all it can affect the improvement of the quality of separate collection and, therefore, the maximization of recyclable waste, making full use of the efforts made by the Hera Group in the circular economy.” — Milena Zappoli, Innovation Manager of the Environmental Services of the Hera Group.
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