In many ways, digital waste tracking is the art of making the invisible visible. Few of us like to think about waste, let alone look at it. But it is a major environmental challenge facing our planet.

Last year, Scotland became the epicentre of the global climate change debate, with thousands of delegates and world leaders descending upon the country for COP26.

However, if there was one thing that marred the event, it was the waste collection strike. Rubbish rapidly piled up, an all too visible warning of the fragility of our environment and supply chains.

If COP26 aimed to focus on the climate challenges facing the world, the strikes put a spotlight on the role of waste management in maintaining the environment.

While most climate strategies focus on reducing the amount of waste, humanity will never be free of it. In fact, waste production around the world is only set to increase – from around two billion tonnes to 3.4bn by 2050, according to some estimates.

As such, making intelligent use of our waste is vital to protecting the environment.

Michael Groves, CEO of waste mapping firm Topolytics, will be speaking at the CAN DO Innovation Summit on February 23rd as part of their Climate Action – Are SMEs the missing link?’ panel discussion.

His company tracks waste, enabling organisations to understand what they’re producing and where it goes. This helps them make intelligent decisions to reduce waste and promote recycling.

COP26

If there was one thing that made COP26 different to its predecessors, it was the role that businesses and other private enterprises played in the event.

“There has always been a big focus on government policies,” Groves says. “But there was more business engagement happening around the edges of the main COP with big companies, smaller companies, technology and discussions.

“One of the things that we’re seeing is a push to net zero. And we’re certainly seeing companies taking that quite seriously.

“But what they’ve got to do next is work out how they address it,” he adds.

There are two ways of looking at waste – as a problem to be solved, or as a resource to develop. But the truth is somewhere in the middle.

Since it is unlikely that society will evolve into a wasteless society, that means finding ways to utilise rubbish – by reusing and recycling.

“Too much material is still going into a landfill or waste dump,” Groves warns.

While there are many parts needed to solve the climate crisis, Groves points to the growing need for better data around environmental management.

Making it Clear

By design, waste management is opaque. However, visibility is a key quality to digital waste tracking .

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” Groves notes. “And that lies at the heart of what Topolytics is trying to do – build a better version of the truth about what is happening to that waste material when it’s put into that system.”

This is made more difficult by the complexity of waste supply chains. Households, businesses, factories, mining, agriculture, all need different processes to deal with the many different waste materials they produce – plastics, liquid chemicals, e-waste, to name a few.

On top of that, in many countries around the world, the informal sector handles a large amount of waste. Even in developed countries, fly-tipping is a major issue.

“Once it’s in the system it is very difficult for a waste producer to know what’s happened to that material. They lose visibility and they lose control,” Groves explains.

“Visibility is your starting point – if you have better visibility, you can start to think about how to change things so that less material is going to landfill, and more is being recovered and recycled.”

Waste is Messy

When everything is mixed and thrown into a landfill, organising and tracking waste becomes impossible. This prevents accurate models being made.

Furthermore, just because material enters the waste system doesn’t mean it stays there. Items may leak out of the system due to the difficulty of tracking it. This can potentially occur at any point, from when it is thrown out, in transit, to when it enters a landfill or recycling plant.

To combat this, data must provide an accurate, verifiable account of reality.

“It’s one thing to have a view about what might be happening, but it depends on how much you trust the data,” Groves notes.

“So building trust in that data enables better decisions to be made about what actually does happen or what could happen to that material.”

The Right Tools

As such, with so much complexity in the waste system, there can never be a single solution for it. From a technological and data angle, that requires a variety of different products and approaches.

“You have big multinational corporations with very sophisticated data systems right down to small, single vehicle waste carriers,” Groves says.

“Even in situations with a large informal sector, some waste pickers are starting to use apps to record information on what they collect.”

However, while the waste industry is making use of some of the advantages of industry 4.0, it still has a traditional, analogue attitude towards data.

“You might have data generated by sensors to optimise collections and siting. You’ve also then got machine vision systems that are being used to sort waste. And then you’ve got robotics for the actual picking, but you’ve still predominantly got very traditional manual data collection.”

But in the same way that a global waste system must accommodate supply chains that reach across continents – taking into account very different capacities and approaches – so too will it have to include different ways of processing data to enable digital waste tracking .

“You’ve got to be able to kind of accommodate that, that range of different levels of data specifications,” Groves says.

Going in Circles

One way to deal with the problem of waste is to move away from a linear economic model towards a circular one.

“What we’re dealing with is a legacy of 100-150 years of the linear economy,” Groves says.

The new model ensures that products are designed to be reused – devices can be broken down into their components, or packaging that is made from recyclable materials. This helps reduce the amount of waste entering the system while deriving more value from the material.

“What I hope is that the less material is going to be lost to us by disappearing into the environment, somehow being dumped illegally or ending up in rivers and oceans or put into landfill,” Groves says.

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Moving towards a circular economy could be a major and revolutionary step towards efficient waste management.

It also means that valuable components are designed to be reused from the outset, so additional value can be gained from them.

But to do this, digital waste tracking needs waste to be categorised and tagged, something very few of us think to do when we throw things out. It’s not just consumer waste, like bits of plastic and food. Industrial waste, mining waste, E-waste – the list is endless.

“There is an opportunity to actually make that waste system work better,” Groves notes. “We can extract more value from that material so less gets dumped before it leaks out of the system.”