Case Study: Hera SpA reduces landfill waste with IBM AI and IBM Consulting

How AI can help reduce landfill waste

Hera SpA, one of Italy’s leading multi-utilities, faced the challenge of reducing landfill waste and improving recycling efficiency across 89 plants, where 1,400 people manually sort material from 6.3 million tons of waste each year. Hera turned to IBM and IBM Garage, along with IBM Consulting and IBM Cloud Paks, to explore how AI could better identify reusable materials and support its circular-economy goals.

IBM helped Hera co-create an MVP in eight weeks using IBM Watson Studio and IBM Watson Machine Learning, with cameras mounted on trash trucks to capture waste patterns earlier in the collection process. The solution showed how AI could improve sorting and recovery decisions, while IBM Cloud Paks modernized Hera’s legacy “Beam” application into flexible, cloud-native “Beam IoT,” creating a more scalable platform for future innovation and potentially lowering recovery and disposal costs.

Hera SpA

Andrea Bonetti

Manager of IT Architecture