CTO behind FossilEye, commissioned by Vattenfall, Tekniska verken and Umeå Energi
At RoboWaste in Jönköping I was CTO. I grew the team from nothing and was responsible for the high-value contracts. The work came in two parts.
CTOof RoboWaste, 2020 to 2024
Sorting with AI vision
First I built state-of-the-art AI vision models that recognise materials, so the waste can be sorted into the right compartments.
FossilEye
Then we turned to plastic, which is most of the fossil content in waste. When waste is burned for district heating, the plant pays for the CO2 through the EU emissions trading system, and the only way to know how much plastic was in a load was to pick through it by hand a few times a year. FossilEye measures the plastic in a whole truckload before it is burned. A plant can then see which suppliers sort their plastic well, and the responsibility for the CO2 can move from the district heating customers to whoever sent the plastic.
How it started
The idea came from three energy companies. In 2021 Vattenfall, Tekniska verken and Umeå Energi formed a consortium to build a system that measures the fossil content of waste. In 2022 they signed with RoboWaste to develop it and build a mobile pilot plant, and in 2023 we delivered the pilot for testing.
How it works
A run takes up to five tonnes of coarsely shredded waste, spread out on a two-metre belt, and two camera systems watch it as it passes. A hyperspectral line camera tells the plastics apart by their spectral signatures: PET, LDPE, HDPE, PVC, PS and PP. Stereo cameras rebuild the volume of every object on the belt. From the plastic type, the volume and the colour images, FossilEye works out how much the plastic weighs. The plant covers 7.8 by 15.4 metres and weighs 8 to 12 tonnes, and it is mobile, so it can move between energy plants.
Military tech in the sorting industry
The stereo vision came from Saab. Together we brought technology built for defence into waste sorting.
Tested against the lab
Avfall Sverige asked IVL, the Swedish Environmental Research Institute, to develop a way to verify scanning systems like this, and IVL tried it out on FossilEye. They tested it in different weather and compared it with hand-picking analyses and with test burns, where the fossil share is measured with C14 analysis. In one comparison the test burn gave a fossil share of 44.0 percent, and FossilEye measured 44.6 to 47.3 percent, depending on how much ash it assumed. When the same batch ran through twice, the two results almost matched (R² 0.97).
On tour
Tekniska verken, Vattenfall and Umeå Energi commissioned FossilEye, and a mobile prototype toured their plants: Linköping in November 2023, Uppsala in December and Umeå in January 2024. SVT filmed the waste pouring through it in Uppsala, in the clip at the top of this post.
What happened next
In 2024 the three energy companies took over the pilot plant and signed a new agreement with RoboWaste to develop it further and bring it to market. Umeå Energi has said it hopes FossilEye becomes standard practice at energy recovery plants in Sweden and Europe, and in 2026 Vattenfall wrote that a verification and certification programme comes next.