With up to 50 billion connected devices predicted by 2020, the blurring of technology into every aspect of our daily lives is becoming the norm with the emergence of cyber-physical systems such as driverless cars, wearable tech and self-healing materials. Welcome to the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
The defining characteristic of this new Industrial Revolution is that it fuses different technologies together; the Internet of Things (IoT) with renewables, renewables with biosciences, biosciences with artificial intelligence, and so on. Where it gets interesting for waste and resource experts is the opportunity it presents to provide smart data around asset utilisation and material optimisation – core aspirations of the circular economy.
“We will accelerate towards a position where we can identify everything,” says sustainability consultant Sandy Rodger, formerly with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (EMF). “So waste will be less an unfathomable mix of stuff, and more a selection of useful resources which can be identified and separated. That unlocks a position where the waste industry becomes the feedstock industry – in other words, an integral part of the manufacturing economy.”
Earlier this year the EMF and WEF jointly released a study ‘Intelligent Assets: Unlocking the circular economy potential’ which suggests that IoT could effectively become a virtualised infrastructure to govern the use and flow of assets through reverse logistics and real-time route optimisation.
“New systems are able to precisely sort and recycle multiple types of materials as well as monitor and incentivise waste disposal behaviour. Such progress could potentially reshape the way assets and resources are reused and recycled across industries, unlocking material value by providing transparency in reverse logistics and materials separation operations,” the report states.
Intelligent Assets
Christian Rudolph, founder of nextcycle and co-founder of Global Waste Ideas, believes the rise of intelligent assets is transforming how we think about material value streams, from cradle to grave. For conventional waste operators, this, he feels, represents a potential threat as much as an opportunity.
“Asset tracking, predictive maintenance and remanufacturing are only three examples where manufacturers utilise material values that once were profits for waste management. Marketable end-of-use material streams are less and less likely to reach conventional waste management companies,” he argues.
Indeed, many leading on this agenda feel the industry is unprepared for the scale of disruption that lies ahead. Antonis Mavropoulous, who heads up Wasteless Future, predicts a number of game-changing developments. These include driverless waste collection vehicles, smart apps for on-demand recycling and reuse, neighbourhood anaerobic digesters, and more challenging end-of-life material streams to deal with such as 3D printed objects and complex e-waste.
“I believe the industry is less open to the radical technical innovation that will be delivered,” he says. “In many cases, waste management is still understood as a problem of infrastructure development, and not as a social system. What will be the consequences? In the future, recycling and waste management will become more of a networked activity, co-ordinated by millions of individual actions.”
Resource Security
This view is echoed by Christopher Thorpe, founder of Intelligent Design Associates. “One can imagine scenarios in the not-too-distant future, where increasing resource security drives more holistic micro- and nano-scale waste management – alongside more effectively applied circular product design.”
So, where does this leave established end-of-pipe solutions such as recycling and energy recovery if individual materials can one day be genuinely treated as resources as they travel through value chains? Realistically residual waste is not going to disappear anytime soon, however the use of smart sensors in reprocessing and treatment technologies could conceivably be combined with real-time data sharing to inform manufacturers about potential product improvements, to close the loop, or to prevent waste occurring in the first place.
The EMF moots a hypothetical example whereby waste streams could be optimised by balancing material composition and caloric value against the cost of processing – for example, selecting between anaerobic digestion and incineration for an organic waste stream. Analysing waste batch compositions in this way could also lead to more refined differentiation of collection tariffs.
There is also potential to apply IoT-enabled interventions at the point of discard to encourage better disposal behaviour and prevent fly-tipping. One EU-funded prototype developed, BURBA (Bottom Up selection, collection and management of URBAn waste), utilises surveillance, feedback and gamification through a smart app to operate intelligently connected bin networks that could inform citizens how to appropriately sort their waste and recyclables.
Going forward, Rodger believes demand will grow for smarter identification and segregation of material types using methods that retain as much value and embedded energy as possible. “That’s why information-based solutions have an advantage over purely chemical or mechanical solutions, which tend to be energy-intensive in themselves and also generally work by breaking things down,” he says.
Waste expert at Shearwater Consulting Roland Arnison says material tracking, reverse vending machines, direct return to supplier and other reverse logistics techniques all show promise and avoid the “distinctly unsexy” local authority wheelie bin system. “But they rely on the material to have enough value to the end user to pull the material through this new supply chain,” he maintains, pointing out that extra incentive may need to be built in to enable this, through more robust producer responsibility schemes, for example.
Encouragingly, the Intelligent Assets report sees a clear role for logistics and waste management in terms of “getting the right stuff to the right place”. In the future, products might come with a digital identity, or passport, revealing key data around material ingredients and the types of manufacturing / assembly processes used. At end-of-use, this data could be extracted by waste collectors to help facilitate disassembly, or redistribution of ‘in demand’ materials into new supply cycles.
Already cheaper, more sophisticated IoT-enabled platforms are coming to market that offer new levels of asset tracking. One example is the UK-based Provenance platform, which is looking to utilise Blockchain (the technology behind Bitcoin) to help businesses keep real-time tabs on materials through throughout the user journey, or use cycle. By tracking these items geographically, Provenance can identify idle assets so they can be collected and launched into additional use cycles.
Big Blue
Another intriguing development is IBM’s Reuse Selection Tool, designed to compile and analyse IoT data about an asset’s location and condition. Effectively it allows users to quantify the cost and benefits of various reverse logistics options for reuse, remanufacturing and refurbishment. Whether these types of innovations can successfully scale for waste applications remains to be seen, but the technology does already appear to be fairly mature.
There is, of course, a data security challenge that comes with all of this. “Data and governance will be issues for sure,” says Rodger. “If we are tracking all our stuff, we need to find ways of anonymising the data without losing its specificity. Ultimately a company picking up a used item for reuse needs to know an address, details of the item itself, and be able to make a payment to an individual, so there’s no escaping the potential for this becoming very intrusive.”
Filtering the amount of data out there so it doesn’t become too noisy is also a key consideration. “While useful data can become amazingly useful data, so too can useless data become total global garbage,” reflects Matt Polaine, a circular economy consultant. “The Internet started life as a research connectivity medium to advance global R&D – now 60-75% of Internet traffic is spam. The IoT has the potential to go this way, with products providing irritating information all the time, forcing users to ‘unplug’ for some peace and quiet.”
Automation and Workers
Potentially more concerning is how the Fourth Industrial Revolution might impact on the industry’s future workforce. Mavropoulous sees big changes ahead. “I am afraid that the future of waste management will be roughly jobless,” he predicts. “Sorting facilities will require few workers or even just one supervisor. Robots and driverless equipment will easily operate landfills. A lot of the traditional consulting work will be replaced by web and mobile apps.”
Arnison echoes this, maintaining that any new process involving sorting, handling, moving or processing waste is almost always faster, cheaper and more effective with automation. “Some exceptions remain – pre-sorting of wastes into different categories by human hand, and brain, may still be more accurate.”
This contradicts perceived wisdom that the circular economy will be good for jobs in the long term. A lot of modelling work has been done by the likes of McKinsey and the Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP) to push the employment benefits of such a shift. “I think we need to be careful what we claim here,” cautions Rodger. “Certainly a linear supply chain which runs once across the world will look different to one which supplies an initial virgin product and then goes through many cycles of reuse and recycling.
“This implies relatively more jobs close to the consumer. Many of the tasks will be more labour intensive, at least initially … but we should consider that to be a temporary phase, as automation will develop in these processes like any other. That’s exactly the effect of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”
Maxine Perella is a freelance journalist.
