With a market-oriented approach, the SCENE partners seek to create interaction with potential customers and industrial players having an experience in the smart city field. JCP-Connect has thus started a dialogue with Suez, a French company which supports the development of cities around the world through their historic expertise on water and waste management.
Suez Smart Solutions, a subsidiary of the Group, offers intelligent solutions and expertise to support the environmental and digital transformation of territories.
After two meetings in Paris to present the SCENE project and share information on Suez experience, projects and expectations, a visit was organised in Saint-Grégoire office, near Rennes, where Suez hosts their “Recycling and valorization” activities.
To collect and manage the waste of its 420,000 inhabitants, Rennes Métropole has chosen to renew its confidence in the Suez group in 2017. The contract covers the collection of household waste, bulky waste and voluntary deliveries to 43 municipalities, for a six-year period and an accumulated amount of nearly 80 million euros. This is one of biggest tender signed in France between Suez and a local authority.
And the contract includes “smart trucks”. The entire truck fleet is equipped with embedded information systems to collect data in real time. Last summer, the 220,000 households in the metropolitan area have been allocated bins equipped with sensors, to record the volume of waste and the frequency of collection. All the data, centralized in the Saint-Grégoire laboratory, is analyzed in order to optimize the collection circuits and the number of passages.
Further, in line with Rennes ambition to become a smart territory, an experimentation has been launched last year regarding air quality monitoring. Two of the 42 Suez dump trucks have been equipped, with sensors to measure air quality, noise levels and energy losses in buildings. JCP and Suez are now exploring the possibility of using Suez trucks to embed a pilot of the SCENE platform. One of the great advantages of such a pilot is that the trash collection itineraries cover a very large surface of the urban area.