The advanced processing and traceability technology project for smart and highly efficient recovery of material resources from complex and emerging waste flows (PRIEM+) aims
to create a solid basis of basic and technological knowledge allowing for
the design and development of cost-effective, highly efficient and reliable
cyber-physical systems based on interconnection of advanced identification
technologies with supervised learning, decision-making support systems
and optimization capacities, automatic, real-time quality control and traceability
to achieve greater productivity (between 10 and 20% higher, compared to
the current state of the art) in the repurposing of high purity (>95%)
polymeric, metallic and mineral resources with complex waste flows corresponding
to light packaging waste, electric and electronic waste, and construction
and demolition waste.
The Basque Country currently generates around 5.8 million tonnes of waste
per year, of which, little more than 50% is recycled. The rest results
in an estimated loss of 44 million euros in materials sent to the landfill.
Moreover, Basque industry consumes around 21 million tonnes of raw materials
per year, of which 77% are imported. These raw materials make up an average
of 61% of production costs.
In this regard, within the framework of the PRIEM+ project, we expect
to repurpose material resources valued at over 6 million euros, reducing
the amount of resources sent to the landfill by 40,000 t/year. The economic
impact associated with the use of these various solutions is estimated
at around €18M/year in the form of earnings for participating companies
and 40 new jobs are expected to be created.
Replication of the tools developed in the PRIEM+ project throughout the
Autonomous Community of the Basque Country may involve a reduction of more
than 200,000 t/year in resources in addition to a reduction in the carbon
footprint of 29,564 t of CO2 equivalent/year, associated with the circularity
of repurposed resources.
The PRIEM+ project will contribute to boosting the competitiveness of
Basque ecoindustry and the circular economy, which currently accounts for
1.12% of Basque GDP, with annual gross earnings of 764 million euros and
18,463 jobs, 2.08% of total employment of the Autonomous Community of the
Basque Country.
Specifically, it has worked on the Reydesa use case, working to provide
a technological response to the automation of the air table that can replace
current use of human visual monitoring with artificial vision to optimally
adjust the operating parameters of said air table. Semantic provided all
its expertise to equip the intelligence system to be able to recommend
and even act on the table based on whether actuators are installed on it.
Semantic also helped integrate smart contracts from the logging, decomposition
and transfer of waste, guaranteeing common operations such as logging weight,
administrative data, order logs and chain of custody data for each waste
flow with blockchain.
