Smart Waste: Turning waste into valuable raw materials with sensors and scanners

Since the beginning of time, man has produced a product with outstanding reliability: waste. However, what has rotted for thousands of years has grown over our heads since industrialization and consumer society thanks to non-rotting waste. The way to get rid of the mountains of rubbish lies in rethinking: rubbish is the raw material of the future. And the way to dismantle it is called “Smart Waste” – electronics that help with sorting and processing.

Helmut Spudich

The bane of modern life and its conveniences is the growing amount of waste that is a by-product of our prosperity. Austria is above average in the EU. Its households produce 4.3 million tons or 480 million cubic meters of garbage annually. If you stacked this up to form a literal mountain, it would be a square half a kilometer on a side, as high as St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna. Or, to put it another way: put it in front of the door instead of constantly throwing it away, giving each resident a colossal sack, almost six meters high, one meter in diameter, and weighing half a ton. And the load gets bigger and heavier every year.

Increasingly over the past few decades, we have learned that the solution to this problem does not lie in larger landfills that are sealed and used as (problematic) building land; not in more incinerators that filter toxic residues but still emit their greenhouse gases into the air; nor in exports to developing countries, which can generate income in the short term and cause significant problems over time.

People had already recognized the answer in ancient times: recycling valuable materials from household and workshop waste. “Antiquity was a strong recycling society,” says archaeologist Sabine Ladstätter, head of the Austrian Archaeological Institute, 2011 Scientist of the Year. Excavations in Upper Egypt proved recycling: Hardly any glass or metal was found, as these materials were collected and melted down again by the Greeks, Egyptians, and Romans. Old bronze and copper statues were melted, and their material reused after destruction.

Circular economy

Recycling and the circular economy are the order of the day to reduce the now gigantic human ecological footprint. With some materials – especially waste paper and glass – this works quite well. For others, the results are still modest, demonstrated by the growing problem of plastic leftovers. Only a third of domestic plastic waste is recycled. The rest is incinerated – in the EU, 55 percent of plastic waste should be recycled in just a few years. And a huge issue that is still in the early stages of being resolved is electronic waste and batteries, which are found in e-cars and singing birthday cards and many microdevices and often end up in household waste.

However, innovative technology can help to solve these problems. Networked garbage cans detect filling levels and potential issues like overheating, making disposal more efficient. Material scanners can detect materials in the wrong bin. All this is the basis for “Smart Waste Management.” The Styrian disposal company Saubermacher, which operates worldwide, is pioneering in this field. Smart garbage cans and material scanners have been in use in many municipalities for several years.