Fresh off Verde.tec, our very first public showcase of the prMRF, RECLAIM just earned more brownie points for thinking outside the box, for decentralised material recovery operations!
The project has been specially selected to be featured in the session “Success Stories from EU-Funded Projects” during the European Robotics Forum 2025 (ERF2025) scheduled to take place from 25–27 March in Stuttgart, Germany. This session is scheduled for 26 March 2025.
The session will focus on how EU-funded projects are driving innovation in the field of robotics and promote the practical exploitation and re-use of project outcomes, ensuring long-term impact. As part of the session, RECLAIM project will present its key contributions and future prospects in the field of material recovery using AI, Data and Robotics and the outcomes from the implementation of the world’s first fully automated portable robotic Material Recovery Facility (prMRF).
While the first part of the session will highlight project’s technical results led by Forth-Hellas, the second part will delve into the application of the project’s outcomes by a beneficiary or a user in their domain and discuss the project’s broader implications, led by International Solid Waste Association (ISWA).
RECLAIM delivers a cost-effective solution: an Artificial Intelligence-powered, easy-to-install portable robotic material recovery facility (prMRF) designed for easy deployment anywhere. The prMRF focuses specifically on European Islands and remote tourist destinations, offering fully automated material recovery operations. For the first time, AI-powered robotic waste management technology has been seamlessly integrated in a “portable robotic MRF”, setting a new global standard in decentralised material recovery
The RECLAIM’s prMRF will be first deployed in the Greek Ionian Islands, starting with Kefalonia in March. Following the initial deployment, a pan-European deployment will be explored, especially for islands and tourist destinations within European Union. In our project, end-users are our consortium partners HELLENIC RECOVERY RECYCLING CORPORATION and Ionian Islands, who have shown keen interest in the prMRF’s potential for Greece’s many Islands.
Greek Islands notwithstanding, RECLAIM project has a global ambition to plug leakages in the solid waste management system in Europe but, in future, also explore deployment potential in some areas outside of Europe, depending on contexts and capacities.
Especially for Europe, RECLAIM has a significant contribution to make at a local and regional scale. The prMRF carries the potential to equip local authorities, such as municipalities, with the latest technology in material recovery operations to deliver on their waste management targets, thereby facilitating the shift to a circular economy of plastics. Reason being local municipalities are better positioned to respond to waste management challenges in real-time. More importantly, local authorities also have a better understanding of citizens’ behaviours, concerns and needs with regards to waste disposal and management.
Of course, the prMRF’s successful adoption by local authorities depends on a host of enabling factors. For example, some key factors are financial support from national budgets, embedding context-dependant circular economy principles in local authorities’ policies, establish public-private partnerships that privilege sustainable manufacturing methods through changes in supply chain and following eco-design principles, and finally working with businesses, civil society, universities, and schools for a wider societal acceptance of the prMRF. Our Recycling Data Game employs a citizen science approach to increase social acceptance of the prMRF. When citizens and civil society play the game, we hope to raise their awareness of recycling and ethically gather their annotation data to enhance and validate our real-world waste database (rwDB) for effective waste sorting by our AI module.
More broadly, the RECLAIM project speaks to the European Commission’s Competitiveness Compass and Clean Industrial Deal in the way that the prMRF is, first and foremost, made in Europe, and serves European interests but once complete, will be put on the market within the EU. This fits well with Europe’s ambitions to be competitive in the tough global market while staying on course to become the first climate-neutral continent by 2050.