Description

CHALLENGE

Nowadays too much of recyclable waste coming from companies is incinerated or buried. Indeed, selective management at source of the waste is expensive for companies, and the collection of very small quantities of material (so-called "diffuse flow") is not profitable for waste collectors

To date, waste from downtown professionals is collected by the municipality. The shopkeepers appreciate the gesture, as well as the people from Angers, sensitive to the cleanliness of their downtown. Nevertheless, the lack of financial incentives complicates efforts to reduce waste or optimize their life-cycle.

It is a system that works well, however:

• more waste flows could be recycled (metals) or recovered (bio-waste);

• the visual and sound pollution of the public road may be reduced at certain times of the day;

• the service could be more flexible for traders.

• it is difficult to encourage selective management at source of the waste, difficult to change habits

• there is a lack of capacity to collect recoverable materials

• up to date, no solutions are provided for the food remains; the rests are incinerated or buried while they are constituted mainly of water

• the waste remain on the streets, there are problems of cleanliness, because tight schedules of collection are fixed

CONTEXT

Angers has been a city of experimentation for more than 20 years. Due to the representativeness of its population, Angers is a city panel on many products and sectors of activity (large distribution, automatic radars).

1: Angers city centre
2: Shopkeepers and restaurants

the challenge owner

The challenges for the smart city are numerous. The city of tomorrow is organized around several axes: environmental issues and energy constraints, better collaboration between its citizens, local authorities and operators, the development of user-oriented economic models and the integration of digital technologies in the city.

The collection of diffuse waste is therefore a problem directly related to the environmental and societal considerations that the Smart City of tomorrow imply.

Angers has been a panel city for more than 20 years and is the place in France where many products are tested before being distributed on the market, for large retailers in particular.

The PAVIC association (http://pavic.io/), created in Angers, is being involved along the same lines of experimentation on the territory.

The founding members of the association comprise 3 colleges: academic, institutional and business colleges. The association promotes collaborative work, the networking of digital actors, training, as well as exchanges and valorisation of innovative projects that are contributing to the purpose of the association. It relies on technical resources made available to its members and aimed at building the technical and operational platform as well as supporting experiments.

The association therefore combines the agility of a Start-up and the resources of its members to shorten the duration of the experiments and facilitate the placing on the market of products and services that flow from it. Very pragmatic, it capitalizes on a single project manager for each experiment, and capitalizes on the feedback of experiments in order to bring the concrete solutions, essential to the success of the project carried out by the entrepreneur / company.

Innovation 

We are looking for different/new solutions from what has already been implemented because: 

• It is difficult to get small businesses or local associations to work: how to establish how much workload should they have (variability + the prediction is difficult)? Then there is a problem in how to remunerate them (the town hall only works with fixed prices)? how to ensure that they will respect the traceability of waste
• The current collection is relatively polluting and expensive, the trucks often caught in traffic jams.

The range of solutions we are looking for: 

• Need: co-ordinate all actors (set up channels), ensure connections, ensure traceability, and ensure remuneration

=> a tool that encourages communication between actors

=> a tool which allows to find logistic opportunities (grouping of actors?)

=> a tool to raise awareness

=> a tool that allows the traceability of materials

=> a tool for engaging citizens in the process

Commitment

The Association commits on to implementation of the necessary means to achieve these objectives and in particular by facilitating the execution of experiments in order to test the use of products and processes designed by solution providers, ensuring their evaluation by potential users (inhabitants, services of territorial authorities, associations, artisans / traders ...).

An experiment is aimed at enabling full-scale testing of a solution or products.

In this context, the association PAVIC will carry out several actions:

• Prospecting of companies interested in an experiment in Angers;
• Preparation with the solution provider of a draft project in relation to the experimentation;
• After agreement of the services of the concerned municipalities involved in the project and on the availability of the public domain, the project will be carried out;
• Supervision of the technical and operational implementation of the experimental project;
• Processing and analysis of experimental data;
• Establishment of the evaluation group according to the type of experimentation;
• Definition and implementation of the communication plan on the experimentation project and communication dissemination (Intelligent City Mag ...)