The European ICEBERG Project, in collaboration with the GAIKER Technology Centre, a member of the Basque Research & Technology Alliance (BRTA), has concluded with notable achievements.
Initiated in 2020, the project aimed to address the challenge of construction and demolition waste (CDW), which constitutes a significant portion of total waste generation. With a consortium of 35 partners from 10 European countries, the project focused on promoting circularity in CDW, from recovery and recycling to the development of sustainable products.
GAIKER, renowned for its expertise in automatic identification and separation technologies, conducted research on an advanced technological solution utilizing hyperspectral vision and multivariate data analysis techniques.
This solution aimed to recover material resources from various CDW streams for reuse in new construction products. The project targeted the automatic identification and classification of mixed stone, gypsum board waste, and mixtures of insulating foams. GAIKER developed and evaluated specific automatic classification models for each case study, utilizing supervised learning algorithms.
These models analyse hyperspectral fingerprints of materials in real-time, facilitating their subsequent separation into independent fractions. In summary, the ICEBERG project successfully demonstrated the feasibility of hyperspectral vision for complex automatic classification of construction and demolition waste.