Waste management that matters
As well-known nowadays, waste and uncontrolled littering represent a huge problem within today’s cities, causing huge investments for fast but environmentally unsustainable disposal.
Most of the cities recognize waste management as one of their biggest problems, while the others often buy services from external companies to “hide” their incredible amount of trash in landfills.
In many cases, even national governments pay ridiculous amounts of money to ship their waste leftovers in remote islands or unknown places, while claiming at the same time “sustainability” in everyday policies.
To stop all of this it is needed to change the entire waste management perspective, shifting through circular processes. That’s precisely what Seeders Capital offers with Zero Waste Zones (ZWZ).
Smart bins
Also, together with new management systems, it is crucial to empower new kinds of technologies, without which it’s impossible to make a real change.
A striking example for a new technological waste management system is the smart garbage bin, which helps citizens, companies and public authorities to handle trash and avoid uncontrolled littering.
The installation of smart baskets within the urban area already proved to be incredibly useful both from an environmental, social and economic point of view.
For some years now, intelligent bins have been put on the market, invented, created and exhibited at Expo 2010 in Shanghai. Similar types of bins are spreading massively all around Europe.
Smart bins are common bins for waste collection, which are transformed with robotics technologies, equipped with measurement systems of certain sizes such as the weight of the collected material, the volume of the same material, the internal temperature and humidity.
Normally the waste collection takes place without any measurement of the collected material and without any immediate information of the disposition of bins, together with their use and their actual operation.
The measurements recorded by the smart bins, on the other hand, arrive via Internet with GPRS (one of the cellular mobile phone technologies) to a coordination center which processes them and sends the information to the Collection Center. The advantage, compared to common bins, is evident as you can see increasing transparency of use, efficiency and savings of unnecessary trucks trips if a bin is empty and, above all, a transparent and clear management of the collection and costs, inevitably reducing the management cost of the waste collection body (energiamedia.it, 2019).
Unprecedented urbanization and rapid population growth have increased waste generated annually posing challenges to cities globally. The annual World Health Organization reports indicate that many people die from preventable diseases as a result of improper waste disposal and management. The provision of classical garbage bins is inadequate in the management of solid waste in cities.
The major problem is that garbage bins fill up quickly, and it takes time for the municipal workers to empty the bins. This paper focuses on a real-time smart garbage bin mechanism for solid waste management in smart cities. Conventional garbage collection and management systems have many shortcomings, including inaccessibility to actual data required, lack of throughput, and late unloading. The mechanism of smart garbage bins allows access to real-time information of any smart garbage bin deployed across the city and helps to resolve the problem of waste overflow from garbage bins and keep the smart cities clean.
To prove their efficiency, it’s easy to collect smart garbage bins users’ experience, who claim a better and more capable waste management system through their installation within cities.
⦁ Melbourne: around the city of Melbourne, there are almost 400 solar smart bins, 2000 public litter bins and 500 cigarette butt bins; all placed to reduce litter. To make recycling more convenient, recycling bins are painted in distinctive yellow to be easily identifiable.
⦁ Florence: these smart new baskets are ideal for busy tourist spots, especially on holidays. The eight times greater capacity and the knowledge of the state of filling guarantee greater availability to accept waste, avoiding spills, ensuring more cleaning of very busy areas and therefore more decoration for the historic center.
Together with smart garbage bins, Zero Waste Zones represent a movement that transforms residential, commercial, agricultural and industrial developments waste management practices to zones that are self-sustained and revenue generating. ZWZ adopters are in control of their own waste, utilize it onsite, and generate higher profitability.
Onsite conversion of waste redesigns the supply chain of waste management and overrides defective frameworks. Our mission at Seeders Capital is to create nodes of integrated sustainable models that leads to true circularity at a local level, and self-sustaining micro-environments.
