Topolytics, a waste analytics company, will use RFID tags incorporating PragmatIC’s technology to deliver the UK’s first comprehensive digital waste tracking solution.

“Topolytics is an analytics company that uses data science and machine learning to maximize recovery of the world’s commercial and industrial waste. Its data platform, WasteMap, ingests data on waste and generates insights on the generation, movement and fate of this material,” Topolytics CEO Dr. Michael Groves said. “This enables waste producers, recyclers, investors and regulators, to achieve better commercial and environmental outcomes.”

Topolytics was awarded £500,000 ($645,877.50) to build a prototype for a UK-wide comprehensive waste tracking system, Groves said.

“The system will monitor and analyze all waste transactions across the UK every year and will enable the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and the environmental regulators in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to generate an up-to-date view of patterns of waste movements, enable better oversight, drive improvements in the waste system and support efforts to counter waste crime,” he said.

“As part of this project, Topolytics will use PragmatIC’s unique, low-cost RFID technology to track the movement of individual items of waste, for example, used car tires as they move through the waste management ecosystem,” added Dr. Alastair Hanlon, chief commercial officer at PragmatIC. “This data will be combined with data from many other sources in the Topolytics platform and analyzed to identify trends that can help organizations and government agencies to better handle waste.

ConnectICs are flexible and thinner than a human hair, suitable for embedding into a wide range of substrates including both paper and plastic. The insights gained from this deployment will be used to improve regulations and processes for more efficient waste management across the UK.

However, one of the main challenges of this project is the vast array and type of different data sources, Groves explained.

“The PragmatIC RFID data is just one source of information coming from the waste ecosystem – others include paper or electronic shipment records, geographical data and data stored in government agency databases,” he said. “Ultimately, the addition of PragmatIC’s low-cost RFID tagging will help to automate some of the data capture activity but combining and analyzing large amounts of disparate data is a significant challenge.”

But Topolytics will be able to get real-time item-level information from the field using PragmatIC’s RFID tagging solution, Hanlon explained.

“The PragmatIC system uses a combination of low-cost RFID tags and readers connected to the Internet to provide real-time tracking data for individually tagged items of waste,” he said. “The benefits of the combined Topolytics/PragmatIC solution are that waste producers, recycling companies and government agencies can achieve better commercial, environmental and investment outcomes.”

This year, Google Cloud and SAP chose Topolytics from 250 companies worldwide as the commercial, scalable technology that could enable the circular economy, Groves said.