Friederike Kleijn
Communications Lead - RECLAIM
One of the EU projects in which ISWA participates is RECLAIM. A project consortium is working on the first portable, robotic Material Recovery Facility (prMRF): an innovative waste separation installation intended for remote areas like the Ionian Islands Region. The program is innovative because of the use of robots and artificial intelligence. In the last period, the project partners made important steps.
The main activities recently focused on the installation’s construction, equipment installation and testing. The installation has been fed with sample recyclable material flows. The cooperation of the mechanical equipment installed was ‘excellent’ according to the project management. The vibrator was able to evenly distribute the materials on the main forward moving conveyor belt, the magnet selected all the ferrous metals and the backward moving belt collecting all the recyclable materials initially fed into the prMRF, also functioned well.
Results can also be reported in the development of a recycling data game. The purpose of this game is to engage citizens in material recovery research and optimization of AI algorithms for material identification, segmentation, and categorization. A prototype of this game is currently being developed and tested on mobile phones. A background article about this interesting citizen science project was recently published on reclaim-box.eu.
The project consortium is funded by the EU Horizon 2020 program and led by FORTH, Foundation for Research and Technology, Hellas (Greece). Project partners are Aimplas Plastics Technology Centre (Spain), Axia Innovation (Germany), ION (Greece), IRIS (Spain), HRRC, Hellenic Recovery Recycling Corporation (Greece), KU Leuven (Belgium), Robenso – Robotic Environmental Solutions (Greece), UoM, L-Universita ta’ Malta (Malta) and ISWA – International Solid Waste Association (Netherlands).
