In northern Germany’s great port city, Axians eWaste has installed a centralised digital platform to ensure regulatory compliance and automate processes while enhancing the user experience in waste management.
As regulatory requirements continue to tighten, waste management is becoming a strategic concern for local authorities. In Hamburg, a city of around 1.9 million people, the multiplication of systems was hampering operational efficiency and exposing the municipal cleaning department to legal risks. The implementation of a centralised digital platform by Axians eWaste Germany marked a shift toward more fluid, more reliable, standards-compliant waste management.
Previously, waste management relied on a highly fragmented organisation. Data gathered from industrial sites, collection points and treatment facilities was stored in isolated systems with no comprehensive overview. Agents often had to input the same information multiple times, which wasted time and increased the risk of errors.
Operational issues and legal risk
“There was no centralised data repository,” says Conrad Paulus, Business Unit General Manager at Axians eWaste. “Information was being collected at different points, and regulatory documents were generated separately. This disrupted flows and created duplications, with a real risk of losing legally important documents.”
For an organisation such as the waste-collection firm Stadtreinigung Hamburg, which handles large volumes of waste, including hazardous waste subject to strict regulation, this fragmentation was harming operational efficiency and posing real legal risks.
Securing traceability
To ensure reliable, standards-compliant traceability of waste, Axians, the VINCI Energies ICT brand, implemented a proprietary solution to centralise all data (weights, customer information, delivery notes, etc.) in an SAP environment accessible to all stakeholders in real time. A pivotal feature of the project was integration with the eANV portal, the German system for electronically tracing hazardous waste, which has been mandatory since 2010. This system requires waste-sector companies to produce documents in digital format, including digitally signed disposal certificates, and transmit them to the authorities concerned.
“Legal certainty is one of our solution’s major benefits”
In connecting its platform to this system, Axians incorporated compliance directly into waste operations without adding to the teams’ workload. “Legal certainty is one of our solution’s major benefits,” says Conrad Paulus. “Based on a reliable dataset, which the authorities can access at any time, it considerably reduces the risk of errors and ensures that documentation is comprehensive.”
Simplify and certify
Some of the previously manual processes have been automated. Where agents would previously have to record customer information and weights on site using paper and pen, then key it into the software for billing and archiving, they now just scan an identity document and record the weight. The data is seamlessly sent to SAP, and invoices are generated automatically. This saves between five and ten minutes per operation. “With more than 30,000 processes a year, this represents thousands of hours freed up for tasks with higher added value,” explains Conrad Paulus.
From the user side, the benefits are immediately obvious: greater transparency, simplified procedures, and the certainty that waste treatment is safe and legal.
A scalable solution
The Axians platform is updated twice yearly to account for regulatory changes. This agility becomes all the more valuable with the implementation from May 2026 of the Digital Waste Shipment System, the mandatory European digital system for declaring, authorising and monitoring transfers of waste between European Union member states.
“This European regulation represents a major challenge,” says Conrad Paulus. “It introduces standardised interfaces, which will allow increasingly automated data exchanges and operational processes. But not all the public authorities and businesses affected are ready.”
Thanks to its platform and strategic partnerships, with SAP in particular, Axians eWaste is well placed as a key player to support this transition. Hamburg’s solution stands as a reproducible model for other local authorities and businesses that will need to accelerate their digital transformations in the next few years.
05/20/2026
