Clara Bilbao

Compounding technology to obtain polymers with specific properties and to recover recycled materials

At GAIKER, we use compounding technology to obtain polymers with certain properties and to recover post-industrial, pre-consumer and post-consumer recycled materials.

We create chippings containing percentages of recycled material as more and more sectors require the incorporation of such materials in the raw materials for the manufacture of end products.

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Along with other partners of Aclima, Basque Environment Cluster, GAIKER aims to raise awareness of its advanced services in environmental technology.

The GAIKER Technology Centre, member of the Basque Research & Technology Alliance (BRTA), is part of the international mission of the Basque Environment Cluster at IFAT 2024, Europe’s leading trade fair for the environmental technology sector.

The activities programmed by Aclima for IFAT 2024 include its own showroom space inside the grouped stand.

Furthermore, within the framework of continuing to address the dissemination of environmental technologies that are an example of the efforts of the Basque environmental sector in the development of technical innovations and technologies that offer advanced environmental solutions (#BasqueGreenTech) for the challenges of the ecological transition, the "International capabilities of Basque companies in the environmental sector" conference will be held on Thursday 16th May at 10.30am.

The event will be held in Room A51-A52 Hall A4 of IFAT and will be attended by various representatives of the Basque public administration, as well as international speakers. After the institutional opening by the Basque Government and a brief speech by Olga Martín, Director General of Aclima, Basque Environment Cluster, it will be the turn of the block focused on companies. After a break, the day will continue with a presentation by Inken Carina, Senior Manager at BDI – Initiative Circular Economy of the Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie e.V. and the closing speech by Alexander Boto, Managing Director of Ihobe. In the afternoon, companies will take part in B2B sessions.

Aclima, Basque Environment Cluster

The Basque Environment Cluster has promoted this international mission, which has been joined by 21 of its partners, including GAIKER, whose destination is IFAT 2024, Europe’s leading trade fair and meeting point for the environmental technology sector, which will take place from 13th to 17th May in the German city of Munich. Stand Location: C3.147/246.

Aclima's international mission has received the backing of the Basque Government through the Department of Economic Development, Sustainability and Environment, the public companies Ihobe, Spri and BasqueTrade & Investment, as well as the support of Bizkaia Provincial Council and Gipuzkoa Provincial Council.

The European ICEBERG project has ended with the demonstration of the feasibility of hyperspectral imaging to perform complex operations to automatically sort construction and demolition waste.

The European ICEBERG project in which the GAIKER Technology Centre, member of the Basque Research & Technology Alliance, BRTA, has participated, has come to an end having achieved significant results.

This four-year research project, carried out by a consortium of 35 partners from 10 European countries, started in 2020 to provide a solution to construction and demolition waste (CDW), which accounts for more than a third of total waste generation, and to address its circularity, from recovery and recycling to the development of more sustainable products.

The partners include GAIKER, an expert in the development of automatic identification and sorting technologies, which has been in charge of researching an advanced technological solution, based on hyperspectral imaging and multivariate data analysis techniques, aimed at recovering material resources contained in different construction and demolition waste streams to be subsequently used in new construction products.

More specifically, it has focused on researching the hyperspectral imaging technique applied to the automatic identification and sorting of mixed stone materials (concrete and ceramic aggregates), gypsum board waste (purification of gypsum board by separating it from other unsuitable materials) and insulating foam mixtures (PUR and PIR).

For each of these case studies, specific automatic sorting models based on supervised learning algorithms have been developed and successfully evaluated. Based on the analysis of the hyperspectral footprints of the different materials, they determine the class or category to which they belong in real time, enabling their subsequent separation into independent fractions.

In conclusion, the feasibility of hyperspectral imaging supported by multivariate data analysis tools has been proven to perform complex automatic sorting operations of construction and demolition waste. In this way, new fractions of recovered materials will be produced with purities that can exceed 90%, enabling them to be reintroduced into the economic cycle as secondary raw materials in value-added applications.

More information:https://iceberg-project.eu/

This project has received funding from the European Commission's Horizon 2020 Research and Development Programme under contract number 869336. This press release reflects the views only of the authors, and neither the agency nor the Commission is responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained therein.