SMART GROUND is conceived as a collaborative space for site operators, public administrators, landfill mining business companies; offering a repository that stores full datasets published and curated by the user community with a crowd-sourcing approach and facilitates the visualization and assessment of the information. The platform plans to become a waste material marketplace connecting private businesses (demand) with RMs providers (supply) or with clients for landfill mining projects. The SMART GROUND database stores information that is structured and converted into searchable, downloadable and easy to process files (csv). The modular and flexible design of the database would allow a potential extension or merging with other databases. Another important aspect of the SMART GROUND platform is the semantic tagging module; that enables annotation of existing data with user-provided and crowd-sourced knowledge and integration of different information sources, with the help of domain experts and/or data users. Thanks to this module, data stored in the relational data back-end can be fused (a) with ontological knowledge, (b) with information of interest to the user, that can complement the database content, and (c) with user-provided and crowd-sourced knowledge bases to provide rich, open user enriched data. Furthermore, the platform allows rough estimations of waste remains in EW facilities and landfill sites, provided that sample data are available. A set of workshops and events have been organized and attended to promote the platform. Meetings with stakeholders – whose needs and interests have been identified through a stakeholders’ survey - have been organized as well as training courses where all the materials developed and results achieved have been presented to the audience. A set of activities have been developed to collect data and information necessary to populate SG platform.
A standardized procedure framework to collect, organize and harmonize data on SRMs amount within anthropogenic deposits has been developed, reviewing existing standards in regards to waste management and extractive industries. This led to develop a set of best practice recommendations. Specifically, a set of recommendations for site investigation for both MSW and Industrial Waste (IW) landfill sites and EW facilities has been completed and used for the pilot feasibility studies. The guidelines were useful to develop the training materials.
The pilot studies included MSW, IW landfill sites and EW facilities. Detailed 2D and 3D thematic mapping were carried out to identify hotspot for SRMs recovery. This was further supported by a comprehensive physico-chemical (and mineralogical for EW facilities) characterization on the different collected waste material fractions, in order to estimate the amount of CRMs and SRMs available at the sites, but also to identify the opportunity of recovering other valuable materials (SRMs) in the same time. Moreover, environmental impacts (on air, water and soil) connected to on-site and off-site processes to recover SRM/CRM and transportation, focusing on EW facilities and landfills have been identified, with a focus also on the health and safety issues.
