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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PTwist (PTwist: An open platform for plastics lifecycle awareness, monetization, and sustainable innovation)

Teaser

Summary

PTwist plans to address the following issues regarding plastics life-cycle:

a) Low plastics recycling and reuse rates
The plastics recycling rate is by far lower than global recycling rates of other materials such as paper and steel. In 2014, less than a third of EU plastic waste was recycled. Recycling of plastic is not popular while citizenâ€™s awareness is low and mis-communicated.

b) Plastics recycled products of low quality or value which in most cases are not again recyclable.
Plastic packaging (by far the largest contributor to plastic waste) is being almost exclusively single-use, especially in business-to-consumer applications. While plastic as a material is not valueless, it is generally perceived as such by the public.

c) Plastics short first-use cycle and plastics collection systems escapes amount to loss of 80â€“100 billion Euro annually.
EU accounts for around 25% of the world\'s plastics production and it largely contributes into generation of post-consumer plastic waste.

PTwist aims to increase the uptake of consumers awareness with respect to plastics reuse and recycling in line with the New Plastics Economy principles for overcoming limitations of todayâ€™s incremental improvements and fragmented initiatives. It engages citizens by a participatory approach that enables the development of new sustainable and collaborative consumption patterns. PTwist will impact environmental benefits due to its paradigm shift in plastics reuse practice that will reduce high rates of plastics ending up to natural fields. By monetizing an everyday material (plastic) and twisting it to an asset which re-enters the market, PTwist progresses as an EU plastics circular economy mobilizing action which will uptake disruptive technologies and generate both social and commercial impact.

PTwist global objective is to support multiple actors in co-creating and sustaining new forms of plastic-as-an-asset practices, strengthening both societal and circular economy actions in-line with digital social innovation principles. As such, the global vision of PTwist is two-fold:

1. To empower citizens, software developers and grass-rooted inventors to co-design trusted applications and tools through an open platform environment at which blockchain technologies drive the plastic material transactions.
2. To increase and sustain the awareness of all stakeholders involved in the plastic reuse value chain, fostering innovation through an increased provision and adoption of plastics as an asset services.

Work performed

The management structure and procedures have been put into place and a Consortium Agreement has been signed, establishing clear rules for the rights and obligations of all partners. The reporting tools developed guarantee proper and timely monitoring of activities and resources. Potential legal and ethical issues, data protection and data management requirements have been systematically identified along with mitigation plans.

The dissemination plan has been agreed and the first set of dissemination materials and tools have been developed. A dissemination reporting tool has been developed and the consortium has participated in several dissemination events and activities.

The innovation management approach has been agreed, including the method and approach for the definition of the exploitation plan. Exploitable results have been defined and a strategic stakeholdersâ€™ analysis has been done to prioritize impact and encourage involvement.

The initial set of user and pilot requirements were collected and progress has been made on the integration of activities of the pilots with the components and services of the platform. Moreover, the technical design specifications and data schemas of the platformâ€™s main components were defined.

Following the implementation plan the crowdsourcing toolkit was completed by M10. The developed attractive web interface offers advanced, yet easy to understand, visualisations of the wisdom of the crowd helping to raise awareness regarding plastic pollution and allowing to identify and understand plastic reuse thematic relationships.

For the monetization components the initial PlasticToken, PlasticWallet and Point of Sell solutions supported by the Hyperledger Fabric permissioned blockchain architecturem are ready at M12. The first release of the marketplace, as a distributed application (smart contract), was also ready in M12. The fully developed API allows for the integration with the gamification part.

On the Tier-1 gamification level, a complete mobile gaming experience is under development and has already gone under 2 iterations of user feedback improvement. In Tier-2 gamification framework a dashboard-based UI is leading the integration process for all platformâ€™s modules. In parallel, a rewarding approach based on a badges system is under development.

Project\'s pilots have developed a specific plan for their individual activites, and provided requirements to the technological development. They work in mobilising their communities, with specific plans for recruitment and engagement and with focused dissemination strategies for each. The initial set of pilot deployment framework and training manual was complete on M10.

Final results

To achieve its innovation potential PTwist will produce significant advances in ICT targeting social and market impact:

1. Blockchain technologies - In order to secure the transactions in a sustainable way, and to motivate the community development similarly, PTwist platform developed an innovative architecture based on blockchain technology for recording and monitoring plastic material, and a new crypto-token for e-transactions. We have developed the first native ERC20 implementation for Hyperledger Fabric, and a novel multi-centric wallet supported by Hardware Security Modules in order to comply with the highest security standards enforced by the banking industry. Moreover, a marketplace was created on top of the blockchain that allows users to buy and sell plastic waste and products based on recycled plastic and supports multiple purchasing mechanisms like direct buying and auctioning.
2. Gamification technologies - PTwist offers adaptive gamification experiences to each of the use cases depending on their local targeting and requirements advancing hybrid rewarding schemes (by leveraging on a mixture of the 6 state of the art rewarding types).
3. Crowdsourcing analytics and topics detection â€“ PTwist develops a methodology for automatically collecting and identifying content of the plastic recycling and reuse thematic. The identification and characterization of relevant information and the fine-tuning of the data collection parameters followed exploits and advances the state of the art in the areas of qualitative crowdsourcing and dynamic topic categorization.

As a main result PTwist will define a framework and an ecosystem around its innovative platform by enabling ICT technologies and tools required to incentivize, educate and sustain communities and innovators under a novel circular plastics economy paradigm. PTwist connects multiple stakeholders in a trusted and reliable manner due to its capacity to monitor plastics cycle from citizens at home to inventors and to the markets, by leveraging on emerging ICT catalysts. A novel circular plastics economy model is planned around the proposed open platform which will offer different levels of functionality and will enable continuous and trusted monitoring.