How-To Develop a Smart Garbage Collection

Finding a Solution to Your Unattended Garbage Issue

This will be the start of a series of “How-To” articles to develop IoT solutions. We will initiate the series with the problem of “Unattended Garbage” which posed a lot of complaints regarding the cleanliness and might cause the outbreak of diseases.

Solid waste is a major problem in our society that impacts both the health and the environment of our society.

The detection, monitoring, and management of waste is one of the primary problems of the present era.

There are many ways to manually monitor the wastes in waste bins. However, this method is still manual and is not very convenient as it needs much human effort and time and it also needs a considerable amount of cost.

Value is created when you make sense of the right data. But before we start deploying sensors, we also need to define the business problems and the pain points from different stakeholders. Probably you need to gather a team from various stakeholders or maybe you can start defining yourself and later validated with stakeholders later.

Defining the Right Problem Statement

Problem Statement

1. Who is collecting the garbage?
2. What is the status of garbage bin?
3. When was the garbage collected?
4. Where is the location of full bins?
5. How to plan the route of the trucks?
6. How many days till the next collection?
7. How much garbage is produced in an area?
8. Why is the garbage truck not picking up garbage?
9. Why is a particular area producing more garbage?

How-To

1. Garbage level sensors on garbage bins and garbage trucks
2. GPS on garbage trucks – to tell the whereabouts of the trucks and give alerts when they are nearby
3. Network infrastructure (Wifi, Cellular, or LPWAN)
4. IOT Middleware (FAVORIOT)
5. Visualization dashboard – looking at the historical trends and checking the KPI
6. Analytics – predictive or prescriptive

This is by no means a comprehensive step-by-step solution but it will help you to start your exciting journey in developing your own IoT solution. Feel free to add your suggestions.

[Source: Municipal waste management and COVID-19]

Interesting Articles

• How-To Develop Smart River Monitoring
• How-To Develop Smart Garbage Collection
• How-To Develop Smart Flood Monitoring System
• How-To Develop Smart Agriculture Solutions

About the Author

Dr. Mazlan Abbas the Co-Founder of FAVORIOT Sdn Bhd. He is an IOT Evangelist and a Thought Leader. He received an award as 50 Most Impactful Smart Cities Leaders by World CSR 2017. He is ranked No. 20th Thought Leader in IOT by 2014 Onalytics Report – “The Internet of Things – Top 100 Thought Leaders”, ranked Top 10 in IoT Top 100 Influencers by Postscapes 2016/2017, ranked Top 100 in Smart Cities Top Experts by Agilience Authority Index May 2016. You can reach him on LinkedIn or Twitter. Check all his presentation slides HERE.