We organise our actions in six thematic & strategic agendas:
Strategic Agendas:
Bio-economy
Circular Construction
Chemicals/Plastics
Manufacturing Industry
Food Chain
Water Cycles
Seven leverages provide additional support:
Leverage effects:
Lever Policy Instruments
Lever Circular Procurement
Lever Communication
Lever Innovation & Entrepreneurship
Lever Financing
Lever Jobs & Skills
Lever Research
What, why and how?
Why are we pursuing a circular economy?
Future visions 2050
How do we see our circular future?
About our management
Who steers what at Flanders Circular?
In recent years, KU Leuven's Re- and Demanufacturing lab has developed new technologies to automatically dismantle waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE). Indeed, rising labour costs and the increasing use of glue and snap connections make it increasingly challenging to open discarded appliances in a cost-efficient way and sort the components for material recycling.
In the SUDE Pilot! project, KU Leuven worked with machine builder Valvan and recycling company Galloo to further develop these new technologies and merge them into a pilot setup. The setup is designed to perform automatically the most labour-intensive task of processing discarded laptops: removing the screws. The main elements of the setup are a six-axis robot, a camera setup and a waterjet cutting machine.
Since the screw coordinates vary for each unique laptop model, we have also developed the necessary software to distinguish different models from each other and add new, not yet recognised models to a database along with the identified screw coordinates. Thus, we will eventually create a database with disassembly instructions for each model.
KU Leuven
Partners Valvan, Galloo
Sectors
Themes
Organisations
We are currently working on a robotic screw removal system that uses the developed product identification software to make the whole system (self)learning. Screw removal with this system is slower compared to waterjet cutting and requires high precision.
There are also challenges, such as removing rusted screws and snap connections, for which we are exploring the possibilities of human-machine collaboration.