New South Wales based Internet of Things company Peclet said it won a $1 million grant with a ptich featuring sensors, data-sharing platforms and predictive analytics to identify profitable ways of reusing waste generated in resource-intensive industries.
A Peclet proof-of-concept proposal won the ‘circular economy’ Innovation Challenge contract for the NSW Department of Planning and Environment.
”Each challenge will start with an open call for proposals to address a specific problem statement, with the best entries presented live at a pitch event,” Minister for Customer Service and Digital Government Victor Dominello said in March last year when presenting the three challenges.
The circular economy challenge aims to fill an information gap in the material flows across the lifecycle of products in sectors like manufacturing, construction, retail, hospitality and utilities.
The second challenge involved using technology to make public spaces safer for women and girls; the third is yet to be released.
Waste data gone to waste
A spokesperson for Transport NSW, one of several government agencies participating in the project, told CRN Australia that longitudinal and real-time Australian-relevant data was needed for investors, businesses, utilities and governments to have visibility of circular economy opportunities.
“Detailed waste and resources data at a business level is not widely available,” the spokesperson said.
“The NSW Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) provides waste data at local government level but this is not detailed enough to identify potential circular economy opportunities and material exchange synergies at business/precinct level.
"Collecting detailed waste and resources data manually from every business is not ideal,” the spokesperson said.
“This project aims to support the local business network to move towards “‘Industrial symbiosis’ where waste and by-products are re-used to enable a local circular economy: making the waste of some the resource of others," Peclet co-founder and director Alex Sales told CRN Australia
“Industrial symbiosis engages traditionally separate industries in a collective approach involving physical exchange of materials, energy, water, and/or by-products.
"The keys to Industrial symbiosis are collaboration and the synergistic possibilities offered by geographic proximity,” Sales said.
Sales said Industrial symbiosis had not been unrolled in Australia yet.
“Industrial symbiosis as a discipline is more developed in Europe, and has been generating many benefits: reducing waste to landfill (and therefore reducing cost of disposing waste to landfill), selling of by-products, and most importantly the creation of new businesses to transform certain types of wastes: this is because in most cases a waste needs to undergo some level of transformation before it can be used by another business.
“This is also a great opportunity for new patents if some transformative industrial processes of certain waste materials have not been done anywhere else before.”
Finding revenue in the rubbish
Sales said a register of businesses’ waste across the production lifecycle was currently being built for the Western Sydney Parklands: a coalition of councils covering more than a million people.
The collected data would be integrated and visualised over an Opendatasoft-based platform, ‘The Parks’, that the partners built together when they unrolled a sensor network for measuring the impact of population growth and development across the region; it won the partners the IoTHub’s 2021 Smart Cities Award.
“We are using Opendatasoft’s market-leading data-sharing platform as we believe that secure data sharing between State, Local Councils and businesses is a key success factor for this initiative,” he added.
Sales said it was too early to say what new ways of recycling waste would be identified because “the opportunities are yet to be uncovered with the data.”
But said common examples of industrial symbiosis included “the generation of biogas and fertiliser from biowaste, and knowing where new biogas digester infrastructure should be invested in; opportunities to reuse meat and vegetable waste in the animal food industry; reuse wood construction waste by wood panel manufacturers etc.”
The innovation Challenges are funded through the Smart Places Acceleration Program. The smart cities focused program was allocated $45 million from the NSW government’s broader Digital Restart Fund, which is a $2.1 billion investment in rolling out digital products and services.
The Digital Restart Fund has financed projects such as the Ministry of Health’s Single Digital Patient Record and the Department of Customer Service’s eConstruction initiative.
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