Periodic Reporting for period 2 - PTwist (PTwist: An open platform for plastics lifecycle awareness, monetization, and sustainable innovation)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2019-01-01 al 2019-12-31
PTwist plans to address the following issues regarding plastics life-cycle:
a) Low plastics recycling & reuse rate
Plastics recycling rate is by far lower than of other materials. Plastics recycling is not popular while citizens awareness is low and miss-communicated.
b) Plastics recycled products of low quality or value which are not again recyclable
Plastic packaging is being almost exclusively single-use. Plastic as a material is generally perceived valueless by the public.
c) Plastics short first-use cycle and collection systems escapes amount to loss of 80–100B € annually
EU accounts for ~25% of the world's plastics production that largely contributes into generation of plastic waste.
PTwist aims to increase the uptake of consumers awareness with respect to plastics reuse and recycling in line with the New Plastics Economy principles. It engages citizens by a participatory approach enabling the development of new sustainable consumption. PTwist will impact environmental benefits due to its paradigm shift in plastics reuse practice that will reduce high rates of plastics ending up to natural fields. By monetizing and twisting plastic to an asset which re-enters the market, PTwist will uptake disruptive technologies and generate both social and commercial impact.
PTwist global objective is to support multiple actors in co-creating and sustaining new forms of plastic-as-an-asset practices, strengthening both societal and circular economy actions, by:
1. Empowering citizens, developers and inventors to co-design trusted tools through an open platform environment at which blockchain drives the plastic material transactions.
2. Increasing and sustaining awareness of all involved in the plastic reuse value chain, fostering innovation through an increased provision and adoption of plastics-as-an-asset services.
a) Low plastics recycling & reuse rate
Plastics recycling rate is by far lower than of other materials. Plastics recycling is not popular while citizens awareness is low and miss-communicated.
b) Plastics recycled products of low quality or value which are not again recyclable
Plastic packaging is being almost exclusively single-use. Plastic as a material is generally perceived valueless by the public.
c) Plastics short first-use cycle and collection systems escapes amount to loss of 80–100B € annually
EU accounts for ~25% of the world's plastics production that largely contributes into generation of plastic waste.
PTwist aims to increase the uptake of consumers awareness with respect to plastics reuse and recycling in line with the New Plastics Economy principles. It engages citizens by a participatory approach enabling the development of new sustainable consumption. PTwist will impact environmental benefits due to its paradigm shift in plastics reuse practice that will reduce high rates of plastics ending up to natural fields. By monetizing and twisting plastic to an asset which re-enters the market, PTwist will uptake disruptive technologies and generate both social and commercial impact.
PTwist global objective is to support multiple actors in co-creating and sustaining new forms of plastic-as-an-asset practices, strengthening both societal and circular economy actions, by:
1. Empowering citizens, developers and inventors to co-design trusted tools through an open platform environment at which blockchain drives the plastic material transactions.
2. Increasing and sustaining awareness of all involved in the plastic reuse value chain, fostering innovation through an increased provision and adoption of plastics-as-an-asset services.
The management structure and procedures have been put into place establishing clear rules for the rights and obligations of all partners. The reporting tools developed guarantee effective monitoring of activities and resources. Potential legal and ethical issues, data protection and data management requirements have been systematically identified along with mitigation plans.
A dissemination plan was agreed and a set of dissemination materials and tools have been developed. The project has been disseminated succesfully in social media with the core effort in Facebook. 5 newsletters have been published and shared within partners’ networks. For post-project dissemination an outreach and take-up action plan has been designed, which will serve as the baseline communication strategy for exploitation related activities.
The main objective of the developed exploitation strategy, is to utilize the project’s outcomes within a self-sustained non-profit organization running PlasticTwist beyond its EC-funded life-time.
By the decision of the consortium the launch of the PlasticToken under the original ICO campaign was shifted to a crowdfunding campaign. It is important to differentiate PlasticToken and its social good purpose from the numerous available digital cryptocurrencies usually geared towards investment. The launch has been set for the early 2020 with interspin CreaLab (HSLU spin-off) agreed to handle the donations collection and then transfer the raised funds to the NPO.
With regards to the technological components, after the initial pilot requirements were collected and the design specifications and data schemas defined, development begun. Progress has been made on the integration of pilots activities with the platform components during an agile methodology. The crowdsourcing toolkit (observatory of crowdsourced plastic topics, open designs, RESTful API) offers advanced, yet easy to understand, visualisations of the wisdom of the crowd aimed to raise awareness and to empower users to understand plastic reuse thematic relationships. Monetization (PlasticToken, PlasticWallet Point of Sell) is supported by the Hyperledger Fabric permissioned blockchain architecture. The marketplace back-end is a distributed application (smart contract) integrated with the web platform, via a new version of the API that allows for the direct rewarding in PlasticTokens through the gamification. Plastic Heroes, a mobile gaming experience was developed and went through several iterations of user feedback improvement. Testing revealed that its target audience is mostly up to 14-years old, where it can serve both as an educational and awareness tool. The gamification framework core includes a dashboard-based UI leading the integration process for all modules and a virtual marketplace with a bidding tool connected with the monetization system. AUTH developed an online evaluation tool and managed an issues tracker to assist the testing and validation of the PTwist ecosystem and services.
Pilots created specific plans for their individual activities, and worked in mobilising their communities, with specific actions for engagement and focused dissemination strategies. All pilots have been active in running science-cafes, innovation bootcamps and other activities, developing prototypes and testing the platform and services. Additionally, TAGES while not an official project pilot, has also organized events in Istanbul focusing on a very interested audience of local stakeholders. The participating communities developed novel ideas on plastic revaluation innovation and plastic-as-an-asset systems. An open voting process was used to select the ideas preferred by the public. The winning ideas were presented by their owners in the project’s final event held in Istanbul on November 2019. The event participants voted for their favourite ideas using their PlasticWallet and PlasticTokens. An important innovation for the PTwist ecosystem concerns the development of a peer-reviewed evaluation tool, following an LCA methodology to value the sustainability of initiatives around plastic waste revaluation and award tokens accordingly.
A dissemination plan was agreed and a set of dissemination materials and tools have been developed. The project has been disseminated succesfully in social media with the core effort in Facebook. 5 newsletters have been published and shared within partners’ networks. For post-project dissemination an outreach and take-up action plan has been designed, which will serve as the baseline communication strategy for exploitation related activities.
The main objective of the developed exploitation strategy, is to utilize the project’s outcomes within a self-sustained non-profit organization running PlasticTwist beyond its EC-funded life-time.
By the decision of the consortium the launch of the PlasticToken under the original ICO campaign was shifted to a crowdfunding campaign. It is important to differentiate PlasticToken and its social good purpose from the numerous available digital cryptocurrencies usually geared towards investment. The launch has been set for the early 2020 with interspin CreaLab (HSLU spin-off) agreed to handle the donations collection and then transfer the raised funds to the NPO.
With regards to the technological components, after the initial pilot requirements were collected and the design specifications and data schemas defined, development begun. Progress has been made on the integration of pilots activities with the platform components during an agile methodology. The crowdsourcing toolkit (observatory of crowdsourced plastic topics, open designs, RESTful API) offers advanced, yet easy to understand, visualisations of the wisdom of the crowd aimed to raise awareness and to empower users to understand plastic reuse thematic relationships. Monetization (PlasticToken, PlasticWallet Point of Sell) is supported by the Hyperledger Fabric permissioned blockchain architecture. The marketplace back-end is a distributed application (smart contract) integrated with the web platform, via a new version of the API that allows for the direct rewarding in PlasticTokens through the gamification. Plastic Heroes, a mobile gaming experience was developed and went through several iterations of user feedback improvement. Testing revealed that its target audience is mostly up to 14-years old, where it can serve both as an educational and awareness tool. The gamification framework core includes a dashboard-based UI leading the integration process for all modules and a virtual marketplace with a bidding tool connected with the monetization system. AUTH developed an online evaluation tool and managed an issues tracker to assist the testing and validation of the PTwist ecosystem and services.
Pilots created specific plans for their individual activities, and worked in mobilising their communities, with specific actions for engagement and focused dissemination strategies. All pilots have been active in running science-cafes, innovation bootcamps and other activities, developing prototypes and testing the platform and services. Additionally, TAGES while not an official project pilot, has also organized events in Istanbul focusing on a very interested audience of local stakeholders. The participating communities developed novel ideas on plastic revaluation innovation and plastic-as-an-asset systems. An open voting process was used to select the ideas preferred by the public. The winning ideas were presented by their owners in the project’s final event held in Istanbul on November 2019. The event participants voted for their favourite ideas using their PlasticWallet and PlasticTokens. An important innovation for the PTwist ecosystem concerns the development of a peer-reviewed evaluation tool, following an LCA methodology to value the sustainability of initiatives around plastic waste revaluation and award tokens accordingly.
To achieve its innovation potential and objectives, PTwist produced significant advances in ICT targeting social and market impact:
1. Blockchain technologies - In order to secure the transactions in a sustainable way, and to motivate the community, PTwist use blockchain technology to develop an architecture for recording and monitoring plastic material, and a new cryptotoken for transactions. We have developed the first native ERC20 implementation for Hyperledger Fabric, and a novel multi-centric wallet supported by Hardware Security Modules compliant with the highest security standards. Also, a marketplace has been build on top of the blockchain allowing to trade plastic waste and recycled products and using smart contracts to support multiple purchasing mechanisms.
2. Gamification technologies - PTwist offered gamification experiences and features to each of the use cases depending on their local targeting and requirements advancing hybrid rewarding schemes.
3. Crowdsourcing analytics & topics detection – PTwist developed a methodology for automatically collecting and identifying content relevant to specific topic areas (plastic reuse/recycle thematic). The identification and characterization of qualitative relevant information and the fine-tuning of the data collection parameters followed, has exploited and advanced the state of the art in the areas of qualitative crowdsourcing and on dynamic topic categorization.
1. Blockchain technologies - In order to secure the transactions in a sustainable way, and to motivate the community, PTwist use blockchain technology to develop an architecture for recording and monitoring plastic material, and a new cryptotoken for transactions. We have developed the first native ERC20 implementation for Hyperledger Fabric, and a novel multi-centric wallet supported by Hardware Security Modules compliant with the highest security standards. Also, a marketplace has been build on top of the blockchain allowing to trade plastic waste and recycled products and using smart contracts to support multiple purchasing mechanisms.
2. Gamification technologies - PTwist offered gamification experiences and features to each of the use cases depending on their local targeting and requirements advancing hybrid rewarding schemes.
3. Crowdsourcing analytics & topics detection – PTwist developed a methodology for automatically collecting and identifying content relevant to specific topic areas (plastic reuse/recycle thematic). The identification and characterization of qualitative relevant information and the fine-tuning of the data collection parameters followed, has exploited and advanced the state of the art in the areas of qualitative crowdsourcing and on dynamic topic categorization.