Ferrovial, a leading infrastructure operators and municipal services company, and EIT Climate-KIC partner, is collaborating with start-up ZenRobotics to incorporate AI and Robotics into the company’s municipal solid waste plants.
Europe will have to recycle 55 per cent of all municipal waste by 2025, according to a ruling passed by the European Parliament last year. For context, less than 30 per cent of all waste generated in Spain was recycled in 2016. It’s therefore increasingly necessary for all potentially recoverable waste to get recycled.
While waste sorting is a highly automated process in Europe, several tasks are still carried out manually in order to sort and recover valuable materials in the waste stream. Such tasks include the quality control of recovered materials and the separation of bulky waste. Workers are exposed to risks due to direct contact with waste. Additionally, waste sorting is a job that requires repetitive movements, which are hard on the human body.
Robotics and AI are innovations uniquely poised to improve the quality of work and health conditions of employees since exposure to waste will be reduced. These innovations will also increase the rate and quality of recovered waste that will re-enter production processes as secondary raw materials, thereby reducing the demand for completely new raw materials as well as the pollution associated with the manufacturing and extraction of such raw materials. Ferrovial decided to collaborate with start-up ZenRobotics for this reason—to support the transition to a circular economy.
“The successful implementation of the ZRR for Municipal Waste project could also have a positive impact on plant workers’ jobs, which are often repetitive, unpleasant, experience high-turnover and are risky. The work will transform into automated systems management and troubleshooting—high-value jobs based on technology,” said Rafael Fernández, Director of Digital Strategy and Innovation, Ferrovial. “Automation technologies will also create new occupations that don’t exist today, much as past technologies have done.”
The Zen Robotics Recycler (ZRR) Robot is equipped with numerous sensors, including machine vision, which continuously monitor the waste stream. The AI recognises the desired materials and the industrial robotic arms, called grippers, pick out these materials quickly and precisely.
ZenRobotics technology has been tested in construction and demolition waste sorting, where it’s achieved rates of 2,000 picks per hour per gripper and purity rates of 98 per cent in separated streams. The technology has demonstrated its capacity to separate bulky items weighing up to 30 kilograms.
