The Retracking project concerns the recycling and traceability of waste fibreglass and fibre-reinforced composites in general.
This waste is ‘hard to recycle’ as there are no standard methods to recycle it. So it happens that fibreglass boats or motorhomes remain abandoned in marinas, fields or landfills.
The Retracking project was developed from 2017 to 2021 together with the Pordenone Technology Pole, the Slovenian Chamber of Commerce and other institutional partners.
The project researched the methodology to be able to reuse this particular waste and implemented processes to recover it by mixing it with resins and giving it new life in the form of panels to be used in furniture or construction in general. An NFC RFID chip is inserted into the new panels. By placing a smartphone near the panel, we can obtain data on its origin and chemical composition. Even at the end of their lifecycle, this information allows them to be reused in the right way following the ‘cradle to cradle’ concept.
Infordata, as the project’s technology partner, developed the cloud portal to manage the flow of recovery, transport and processing of fibreglass waste.
In the industrial processes, it added IoT components and developed machinery for inserting the chips into the panels and the subsequent tracking of information.
The Cloud Portal also acts as a data collector to track all the information related to the various processes by displaying it on dashboards with performance indicators and monitoring data such as the amount of CO2 not released into the environment.
Through the implementation of a pilot project, the functionality of a new circular economy model was verified to ensure effective management of the recovery, treatment of FRC waste and its transformation into ‘secondary raw material’ to be used for the manufacture of new products that are 100% recyclable.
The technologies developed in the project make it possible to track new products made of recycled material and enable reverse logistics.
This new model is designed to be replicable throughout Europe.