Innovative Techniques for Waste Management

This work focuses on innovative approaches applied to waste management and aimed at developing strategies and actions which can be operatively integrated into the design of environmental services. Innovations presented here, belong to the HERGO project, developed within the Hera Group, and aimed at providing the complete traceability of collection routes by means of ICT solutions. In practice, an interconnection between a central management system, a system for data acquisition and field devices, has been realized to provide a profitable exchange of information about environmental services. All the data collected on field, by means of sensors and readers, are georeferenced as the system is connected to WEB GIS. Traceability of the collection processes represents a strong innovation in the field of waste management and it is intended to be the basis for future developments aimed at improving the environmental services. Indeed, as shown here, data collected into the HERGO system, can be employed to optimize the collection routes, which produces relevant improvements from both a logistic and environmental point of view. Under future scenarios, also related to climate change, the identification of solutions able to reduce resource consumption and depletion, may significantly produce benefit at global level for the society as a whole. As such, the analysis and approaches described here, are in line with the priorities identified by the European programmes for climate and row materials. Among these priorities, an important role is played by recycling. For this reason, part of the research is related to the application of Life Cycle Assessment to quantify the environmental benefit deriving from the employment of recycled materials under scenarios of interest.