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Smart Household Waste Management

Project description

Weighing and tracking waste in ‘pay as you throw’ collection schemes

Households generate a tremendous amount of waste. Despite programmes for recycling and composting, much of the waste ends up at garbage dumps. Reducing waste and encouraging a circular economy is behind current ‘pay as you throw’ (PAYT) schemes. However, there is currently no good way to capture the volume of garbage in the standardised bags and thus ensure those with less garbage pay less. The Spanish SME Distromel has developed a weighing system along with radio frequency identification tags that can be integrated into containers to help optimise waste collection in PAYT programmes. The EU-funded SmartDtd project is helping the team prepare the commercialisation plan.

Objective

"EU Waste Framework Directive targets recycling rates of 50% by 2020 for municipal waste. To reach this goal new waste management strategies need to be applied by municipalities, not only to align with EU recycling targets but also to be able to cover increasing disposal costs. Strategies should begin by making households aware of the necessity to lower their waste generation, while increasing their recycling rate. One of the most effective ways to motivate households, is through ""Pay as you throw"" (PAYT) schemes, based on the implementation of a disposal fee per household, according to the amount of waste generated. In order to be able to apply PAYT schemes, selective waste collection needs to be implemented by municipalities or waste management companies. One of the most common, is door-to-door (DtD) waste collection, as it greatly facilitates the application of PAYT schemes while promoting recycling among households. Even though, the combination of DtD collection with PAYT greatly reduces the load of waste generated, current systems to account for the amounf of waste generated per household are not accurate. They quantify based on the number of bags/bins (with a set volume) each household generates, without considering that in many occasions these bags/bins are just partially filled upon collection. Nevertheless, households are charged the same, neglecting if all the volume has been filled. A new accurate measuring system is needed. We are Distromel, a spanish company specialized in the develoment of technological solutions for the waste management market. Aiming to solve an increasing concurrent demand from private and public WM companies, we have created SmartDtD: a certified weighing and identification system (RFID number) integrated in a container that can be embedded in any truck (under EN-840).SmartDtD is a technological solution specially designed for door-to-door waste collection that will help optimize waste collection services as well as PAYT programs."

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Programme(s)

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Topic(s)

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Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1

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Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

(opens in new window) H2020-EIC-SMEInst-2018-2020

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Coordinator

DISTROMEL SA
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 50 000,00
Address
CTRA A-133 KM 4.8
22512 SAN ESTEBAN DE LITERA HUESCA
Spain

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SME

The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.

Yes
Region
Noreste Aragón Huesca
Activity type
Private for-profit entities (excluding Higher or Secondary Education Establishments)
Links
Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 71 429,00
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