Page 8 - U4SSC Case study: City solid waste management, June 2020

going up to 65 per cent by the year 2035. However, in Spain this figure remains stuck at 29 per cent
and the worst part is that the figure has remained practically the same since 2010. 2

In 2017, Ecoembes, the organization responsible for the recycling of packaging in Spain, created
TheCircularLab, the first innovation centre in Europe on circular economy, whose main target is to
3
analyse, design, promote, test and apply in a real environment the best practices in all phases of recycling.
Working closely with its technological partner, Minsait (from the Indra Group), TheCircularLab has
4
developed and deployed the SmartWaste initiative, which applies smart city technologies to monitor
and control the entire process of recycling urban waste.

Challenge and response

Increasing the rate of urban waste recycling in Spain to meet EU targets requires facing the following
challenges:

• The lack of awareness on the part of citizens, due mainly to the lack of information about the
importance of recycling and its impact in the environment, and how it must be done at home.
• There is no measurement of the quantity of correct disposal of waste generated at home, so
promotion policies like individual or community payment for waste cannot be properly enforced.
• collection is a service mainly undertaken by contractors so local authorities do not have real-time
information about how the recycling process is taking place on the streets, and therefore, do not
know the needs, type and location of the containers, or the frequency of filling and their efficiency
of materials in order to control the compliance of service level agreements.
• Some areas still maintain a low quality of collected material, with a large number of improper
elements that make it difficult to re-use, due mainly to the lack of education in recycling of all actors
involved in the process.

It is important, therefore, to monitor the recycling process using real-time information, which enhances
transparency for the citizens, facilitates the implementation of promotional campaigns, optimises
municipal resources dedicated to the collection of urban waste, and increases the efficiency in re-
using the material.

In line with this, Minsait has developed the SmartWaste project for collecting and analysing data
from all types of sensors located throughout the recycling process, which allows relevant data to be
obtained, in order to make predictive models of behaviour that help in decision making. Currently, the
SmartWaste project is in the deployment phase as a pilot project in four management units that bring
together 275 Spanish municipalities, and serves a total population of more than 600 000 inhabitants.

2 Case study: City solid waste management, June 2020