19 Mar

The European project GRESINT strengthens ties between Galicia and Portugal in the field of sustainability

The European project GRESINT, which is based on artificial intelligence applied to waste, strengthens ties between Galicia and Portugal in the field of sustainability

Led by Sogama, participate as partners CITIC on behalf of Galicia, and LIPOR and the University of Beira Interior, on behalf of Portugal.
It aims to improve the separation of packaging through intelligent technologies that will be tested through three pilots at the Sogama and LIPOR packaging sorting plants, aiming to contribute to the achievement of European recycling goals.
The project was officially presented yesterday, at the GAIN headquarters, in Santiago de Compostela, and closed by the second vice-president and minister of Environment, Territory and Housing, Ángeles Vázquez.

Cerceda, March 15, 2024 - Yesterday, March 14, the launch Conference of the European GRESINT project, led by Sogama, took place in Santiago de Compostela, more precisely at the headquarters of the Galician Innovation Agency (GAIN), in which participate the Center for Research in Information and Communication Technologies (CITIC) of the University of A Coruña, representing Galicia, and, representing Portugal, the Association of Municipalities for Sustainable Waste Management of Greater Porto (LIPOR) and the University of Beira Interior (UBI).

The objective of this project is to improve the separation of packaging through intelligent technologies that will be tested through three pilots in the packaging sorting plants of Sogama and LIPOR, thus aiming to contribute to the achievement of European recycling goals, introducing high quality recovered materials into the production cycle that will replace the virgin ones.

The president of Sogama, Javier Domínguez, accompanied by the regional coordinators of POCTEP in Galicia and Portugal, Xosé Pérez Lago and Mário Guimarães respectively, was responsible for opening the event.

On the other hand, the general director of Sogama, Mirta Sueiro, explained the details of the project, as well as the role that this public company will play in it, and José Henrique Silva, technician at LIPOR, presented the details of the tool that the entity designed for the digitalization of waste management.

A round table moderated by the general director of Quality, Sustainability and Climate Change at the Xunta de Galicia, María Sagrario Pérez Castellanos, analyzed the advantages of artificial intelligence applied to waste, with interventions by Elísabet González, Innovation manager at the company PreZero; Bernardo Riveira, Director of Operations and Development at Cinfo; and Laura Alonso and Joan Mestre Adrover, respectively Environmental technician and councilor of the Municipal Council of Sant Llorenç des Cardassar (Balearic Islands).

Additional activities

Chosen within the scope of the third call for the Spain-Portugal Interreg Program (POCTEP 2021-2027), the GRESINT project, with an execution deadline of 2026, has a budget allocation close to 800,000 euros and includes a series of activities such as the development of an Agenda of Digitalization of the waste management process, a catalog of smart technologies on the market that may be relevant in improving industrial processes and a roadmap for implementing the key technologies identified.

As Javier Domínguez stated during his speech, "It is not the first project that we have carried out together with Portugal and we believe that it will not be the last either, because, in each collaboration, we have obtained very important results”, to which he added that "as we want and we must be more ambitious, on this occasion we fully immersed ourselves in applying artificial intelligence to the packaging waste separation and management process, and we did so with one ultimate goal: to increase recycling rates on both sides of the border.”