Few people remain who have not been to Paris and checked the dimensions of the Eiffel Tower. With that image in our head, let’s do the following exercise: without moving from the City of Light, let’s visualize the vast Champs Elysées – 1910 meters long by 70 meters wide – and place 20 Eiffel towers along its entire length. That is exactly the amount of waste that we generate in the cities of Spain every year: 23 million tons.
Is it possible to recycle all this waste? The answer, unfortunately, is that, as of today, no: the municipal waste recycling rate in Spain in 2021 was 35%, far from the target set by the European Commission for 2025 of 50% and the average for the European Union of 48%, according to a report on the circular economy of the Cotec Foundation for Innovation.
There is more. Our waste deposit in the landfill in 2019 was 54%, a figure that is far from the EU objective of not exceeding 10% by 2035. In the EU as a whole, this indicator fell by 50% between 2000 and 2019, but the percentage of incineration increased from 16% to 27%, with the consequence of the increase in highly toxic emissions that it generates.
In 1982, the first glass container was installed in our country, the first intended for recycling, with which the concept of separating garbage at home was born. And shortly before 2000, the collection of paper and packaging began to be managed. In a little less than 50 years, we have gone from manual recycling to the automation of this process and the appearance of specific facilities where different types of waste are treated.
Now a Catalan waste sorting machine company includes artificial intelligence in the process.
In general, the first phase of recycling consists of a classification of waste by mechanical separation, where the materials are identified and roughly separated on a belt. That at this first moment the waste is pre-sorted is a good part of the success of the entire recycling process. From here, the artificial vision designed by this company comes into play, which is like the evolution of the human eye.
The AI ??then detects and classifies the different types of materials. And finally, a robot (usually an arm) separates the pre-sorted waste into kilos or tons per hour.
“To artificial vision we have added a layer of deep learning, which improves the separation of waste by characteristics and materials”, explains Joan Manel Casamitjana, CEO of Picvisa. Thus, for example, a mobile phone of a brand “x” could be recognized and separated thanks to the immense libraries of material data that have been labelled, “we have told the machine: ‘this is a mobile and also of such a brand’ and then, when that mobile goes through the tape, it detects it”.
Through a human-like learning process, this technology not only detects the device in question, but is also capable of distinguishing it in fragmented debris, even very small ones, because the machine has been programmed to be able to enlarge any of these pieces and recognize If it is a specific mobile, a piece of white or green glass or a silicone bottle of any brand.
The most innovative thing this company is currently working on, present at DFactory, the industry 4.0 cluster of the Consorci de la Zona Franca de Barcelona, ??is detecting and separating glass from the rest of the waste, removing all that is not inside the green container, by mistake or because it has not been separated at home. “We have developed a process by which we are recovering all that glass that was lost and went to the landfill. The fact that the glass ends up there implies that it will remain in the environment forever and ever because it is infinite, it does not disintegrate. With a relatively simple process we can, however, reuse it”.
On the other hand, they are working on several projects for the separation of light containers (water bottles, aluminum cans…), and in textiles a separation plant by composition and percentage of composition is already underway (cotton, polyester, wool…), also with the intervention of artificial intelligence.
This sector, without waste regulations, “is one of the great problems of recycling, because the fabric circulates everywhere and always ends up returning to the landfill, although in reality it is a very easy material to reuse or recycle; it can be easily introduced into the manufacturing chain.”
“The last phase is for it to be a totally closed cycle in which we can automate and extract data from all the materials that are being treated and have traceability of the waste”, comments Casamitjana. The evolution of 3D printing, which will allow (it is already doing so) to produce exactly where it is needed and without the economic and environmental costs associated with a certain part of logistics, would also form part, according to him, of the processes of future production, which would simplify and optimize recycling.
As for companies, there is no doubt that they are relevant players in recycling: “it cannot be that there are materials that we are returning to the landfill in large quantities, such as textiles, and then we go sustainable. We must control the greenwashing practiced by many companies and start today to sort the waste, even those that, for the moment, cannot be reused, because in the future, it is likely that it will be possible. The key to the reuse of waste is in the collaboration of the different sectors”.
And finally, and not last, would be the contribution that we make from home: “Not all the responsibility for recycling should fall on people, but it is true that from our home we can be of great help by separating and reusing materials in the measure of our possibilities and space that we have. It is only a matter of ensuring that the waste is sorted instead of mixed together and that we do not deplete resources, and for this we must educate in circular economy”.
Picvisa was one of the first companies to settle in DFactory Barcelona when it opened its doors in 2022. “Two of our collaborators suggested that we work in a collaborative place. We wanted to move from a typical industrial and traditional manufacturing environment to something much more modern and this was the perfect ecosystem, finding synergies here, for example, with companies that manufacture parts for our machines in 3D”, concludes Casamitjana. This year, Picvisa, which tripled its turnover between 2021 and 2022, celebrates its 20th anniversary”.
“The idea is that here not only companies that did not know each other are known, but also work on joint projects related to artificial intelligence, robotics or 3D printing,” explains Pere Navarro, special delegate of the State in the Consorci de la Zona Franca of Barcelona.
With these synergies “it is intended to change the Spanish industrial fabric, support companies during their digitization process and turn Barcelona into the center of 4.0 innovation in southern Europe”. The DFactory project consists of a 17,000-square-meter warehouse already built and a future second 72,500-square-meter plant.
“We are very satisfied, because this building, which is architecturally unique, is also unique when it comes to having a calling effect on new companies dedicated to industry 4.0 technologies.” Dfactory also takes sustainability into account: “We have a seal, the Leed Gold, which is the one that indicates that it is a sustainable building, not only from the energy point of view, but also kind to those who work from here. And all the companies that we have here are developing projects that have to do with the 17 Sustainable Development goals”, he concludes.
