Smart Waste Management-An IOT Solution

Abstract

Nowadays there is a clear trend that the use of ubiquitous computer technology can improve our standard of living as we know it. This use of technology to solve fundamental problems demands our approaches to solve basic problems to be digitized and evolved. To make cities greener, safer and efficient, Internet of Things (IOT) can play an important role i.e. connecting vehicles, devices and other infrastructure throughout the cities with each other. This gives rise to a modern term known as Smart City, ‘A municipality that uses information and communication technologies to achieve optimization of how cities function and to drive economic growth while improving quality of life of its residents’.

Managing collection and disposal of solid waste is one of the main concern for municipal authorities. The existing and traditional system of waste collection is a cumbersome process and utilizes a lot of time, money and human effort. Irregular pickup of domestic solid waste results in pollution, health issues and diseases. This document discusses an approach to revamp the disposal, collection and recycling of garbage at an individualistic level. Our proposed system provides intelligence to the wastebins, which enables them to read and transmit data over internet. This is achieved using different sensors and communication modules. This data, when accessed by intelligent algorithms, is used to optimize waste collection process. The system merges the fields of Electronics and Software Engineering to present an elegant solution, for the benefit of humanity.

The system requires a certain amount of infrastructure to be present before it can be implemented. The following sections shed light on the prerequisites of the system also mentioning the tentative technologies that might be used in such a system while carefully discussion the significance of the human factors involved and the applicability of the routing algorithms crucial to the effective functionality of the system.