The Retracking project focuses on the recycling and traceability of fiberglass and general fiber-reinforced composites waste. These wastes fall into the category of “hard to recycle” because there are no standard methods for recycling them. As a result, fiberglass boats or campers are often abandoned in marinas, fields, or landfills.
The Retracking project was developed from 2017 to 2021 in collaboration with the Technology Center of Pordenone, the Slovenian Chamber of Commerce, and other institutional partners.
The project has researched the methodology for reusing such specific waste and implemented processes to recover them by mixing them with resins and giving them new life in the form of panels used in furniture or construction in general. The new panels are equipped with an NFC RFID chip so that when smartphones are brought close to the panel, data on its origin and chemical composition can be obtained.
Even at the end of their lifecycle, this information allows for proper reuse with the concept of “cradle to cradle.”
Infordata, as project’s technological partner, has developed a cloud portal to manage the recovery, transport, and transformation of fiberglass waste. It has added IoT components to industrial processes and developed machinery for embedding chips in the panels and tracking the information.
The Cloud Portal also serves as a data collector to track all information related to the various processes, representing them on dashboards with performance indicators and monitoring data such as the amount of CO2 not emitted into the environment.
Thanks to the implementation of a pilot project, the functionality of a new circular economy model has been verified to ensure effective management of the recovery, treatment of FRC waste, and their transformation into “secondary raw material” to be used in the manufacturing of new products that are 100% recyclable. The technologies developed in the project allow for monitoring of new products made from recycled material and enable reverse logistics. This new model was designed to be replicable throughout the entire European territory.
Infordata Sistemi has joined the first 400 partners of the ambitious Gaia-X project that aims to securely interconnect the data of European organisations via specific ‘Data Spaces’ for the various production chains.
During the conference, various plastic materials will be examined within the waste hierarchy. The best solutions for producing and extending the product lifecycle, optimal methods for waste collection and recycling,
