ORION

Orion Dashboard - Smartground

SMART GROUND

What is SMART GROUND?

SMART GROUND is an EU funded project that aimed at improving the availability and accessibility of data and information on Secondary Raw Materials (SRM) in the EU territory, while creating collaborations and synergies among the different stakeholders involved in the SRM value chain. The project started in October 2015 as part of the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. In 2018, the project was finished. The consortium carried out a set of activities to integrate all the data from existing sources and new information retrieved with time progress, in a single EU database. Such database will also enable the exchange of contacts and information among the relevant stakeholders (e.g. companies), which are interested in providing or obtaining SRM.

The project also delivered a Decision Support Tool (DST) on landfill mining. This tool was designed in order to assist landfill site operators or consultants within the waste industry in the decision making process on landfill mining. Issues like feasibility, technology or project design outcome were addressed. The tool was created to help the user’s decision process by assessing the economic, environmental and social outcomes for nine possible landfill mining scenario’s which differ in processing and technological effort. The tool allows the user to input his own parameters, including waste composition, presence/absence of a liner, population within 1 km of boundaries, estimated land values and distance to local waste treatment facilities and energy plants. If the user does not know the values of some of these parameters, the tool provides some default values derived from the landfill mining literature. The user can choose between five different waste composition mixtures, based on the origin of the waste materials. The user can also select his criteria for the best-case scenario selection (e.g. economic value or environmental). In that way, the results are tailored to the user’s needs. The tool predicts the revenues, costs, net income, environmental impacts and social impacts for the best-case scenario, and allows the user to compare all outputs across the nine different scenario’s.

How to use the SMART GROUND Landfill Mining DST?

A detailed description on the use of the SMART GROUND Landfill Mining DST can be found on YouTube.

Why is the SMART GROUND Landfill Mining DST included in the Orion tool?

Depending on the path that the user has taken in the Orion Roadmap, Orion will suggest to develop an ELFM project or to develop a business case. For landfill sites obtaining this answer in the Orion tool, the SMART GROUND project can be of great value in terms of contact and information exchange through their EU wide database, to bring you in contact with relevant stakeholders, other landfill site operators or consultants within the waste industry. Furthermore, their decision support tool can assist the user with issues regarding feasibility, technology or the outcome of his project design. Within the tool, these issues are addressed for the ELFM project, by estimating the economic, environmental and social outcomes for different  scenario’s that you can assess within the context of the project. Lastly, SMART GROUND also offers a tool to select the best available techniques to process the landfilled waste.