Case study
WEEE recycling platform with automated compliance
How we cut ANPM reporting time by 90% and removed errors on waste transport notes for a WEEE operator with 4 sites.
A project from before Vanadium Systems SRL was founded (April 2026). Projects like this one led to the company.
Context
The operator collects and recovers WEEE (waste electrical and electronic equipment) across 4 sites in Transylvania, with ~65 employees and roughly 12,000 operational documents a month (transport notes, collection sheets, weighbridge reports, shipping documents).
Before the project, operations ran on a mix of:
- An invoicing SaaS (Smartbill): for customer invoices
- A shared Excel file on Drive: for collection sheets and current inventory
- Local software on an old PC: the interface with the truck scale
- Word documents: for the quarterly ANPM report (the Romanian environmental agency), built by hand
Challenges
- Monthly reconciliation between the scales and the SaaS took ~14 hours of admin work
- The quarterly ANPM report took 3 days with an external consultant, who pulled data by hand from 4 different sources
- Errors on transport notes: 2% to 3% of the volume, each one a real risk of a fine (ANPM/ANSVSA)
- No way to scale: every new site needed one more full-time admin
- Hardware integrations: the truck scale used RS-485 with no API, and the scales at 2 sites exported only a proprietary CSV
Approach
We built a custom platform with 4 integrated modules:
Collection module
- Weighings captured directly through an RS-485 adapter → internal REST API
- Real-time check of the waste category against the supplier's permit
- Collection sheet generated automatically, with a QR code for later tracking
Transport module
- Transport note generator with checks on every mandatory field (waste code, authorized carrier, destination)
- Approval workflow with an electronic signature for the environmental officer
- Automatic archiving with 5-year retention, as the law requires
ANPM module
- Quarterly reports generated in the official ANPM format, ready to submit
- Cross-validation of stock (inputs - outputs = current stock)
- Automatic alert 30 days before the reporting deadline
Management module
- Executive dashboard with KPIs per site
- Drill-down to a single transaction
- Configured exports for large customers that asked for their own format (3 multinationals)
Results after 9 months in operation
- ANPM reporting time down from 3 days to 2 hours per quarter: automatic generation
- Monthly scale-to-SaaS reconciliation down from 14h to under 1h: automated workflow with checks
- Errors on transport notes down from 2-3% to under 0.3%: checks at the moment of entry
- Compliance document throughput up 40%: manual steps removed
- Hours saved per operator per week: 8h, moved to work with more value
In month 6 the operator opened a fifth site without an extra full-time admin: an estimated saving of 38,000 EUR a year.
Tech stack
- Backend: Laravel 11 + PostgreSQL
- Frontend: React + shadcn/ui
- Hardware integrations: Node.js daemon on a Raspberry Pi for RS-485
- Compliance: PDF/A generator for long-term archiving
- Hosting: Cloudflare + backup storage in 2 regions
- Monitoring: Sentry + UptimeRobot + alerts on a dedicated channel
Status
In production for 14 months. New modules are added continuously. In 2026 we launch the extension for batteries (DBA) and scrap iron on the same architecture.