Project description
Software for a circular economy
Europe's demand for water, food, energy, land and minerals continues to grow. Demands on the world's limited stock of resources has made it necessary for Europe to make more efficient use of both virgin materials and waste. The EU-funded Síner project will develop software that can manage and estimate resources (raw materials, waste, water and energy) and waste (wastewater, residual heat) data of the industries, in order to identify potential synergies between companies. It will gather data from different sources and process it via Big Data tools and algorithms that are capable of estimating the unavailable data. By improving understanding of the EU market, the project will make it possible to identify regional market variations in terms of purchase decision-makers, appropriate business models and pricing structure and to identify the most attractive markets.
Objective
The demand for resources (water, food, energy, land and minerals) is continuously increasing, given the rising purchasing power of a
growing populatiThe demand for resources (water, food, energy, land and minerals) is continuously increasing, given the rising
purchasing power of a growing population. The global resource extraction is projected to reach an estimated value of 184 billion
tonnes in 2050 and the supply could be further aggravated by climate change, making natural resources increasingly scarce and
more expensive.
Hence, industrial symbiosis is the tool to implement circular economy into the manufacturing sector: it’s the process by which waste
or by-products of an industry or industrial process become the raw materials for another. Big data analysis is a promising approach
to identify the potential industrial symbioses within the perimeter of a large industrialized city. However, industrial symbiosis hasn’t
been widely implemented because resource input and waste output data aren’t disclosed or collected, making data-driven and
optimisation solutions very difficult to implement.
Simbiosy has developed Síner, an industrial symbiosis project management software that manages and estimates resources (raw
materials, waste, water and energy) and waste (wastewater, residual heat) data of the industries within a given territory. Síner
gathers data from different sources and processes it via Big Data tools and algorithms that are capable to estimate the unavailable
data.
The aim of the phase 1 project is to improve our understanding of the EU market for industrial symbiosis management tools, identify
regional market variations in terms of purchase decision makers, appropriate business models, pricing structure and identify which
are the most attractive markets for us to use as a beachhead.
In the EU, circular activities generated almost € 147 billion in value added and account for €17.5 billion worth of investments. We
plan to target 16,884 municipalities.
Fields of science
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringwater treatment processeswastewater treatment processes
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesdata sciencebig data
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesbiological behavioural sciencesethologybiological interactions
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesatmospheric sciencesclimatologyclimatic changes
- social scienceseconomics and businesseconomicssustainable economy
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1Coordinator
08015 Barcelona
Spain
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.