By Anjana C Srikanth
The world generates 1.3 billion tons of municipal solid waste each year, according to the World Bank, and that figure is expected to hit 2.2 billion tonnes by 2025. This figures hit me after I got back from a visit to Chennai, a city I had lived in for a short period many years ago. Nostalgia drove me past the streets of Adyar and Besantnagar, scanning the changed landscape for familiar sights and faces. One thing struck me as we drove around the city: the missing garbage piles that Chennai was notoriously famous for a decade ago.
Indian cities have waste management problem
It was only natural that I looked on with envy and wondered why Bangalore, now my home city, had gotten into the mess it is in. From the green garden city of my childhood, it has transformed into a heap of rubbish. One of its many ills is the ugly sight of misshapen, slimy, black plastic bags of waste lying alongside rotting, open garbage, every few metres along many roads. Dogs and cows scavenge in the piles, as the volume of the garbage heaps continue to grow, not to mention the stench.
You often read in the newspapers about how Bangalore does not have enough people to pick up garbage and lacks much-needed trucks. The city’s assigned garbage collectors do not want to be tagged with RFID identities, as that would mean showing up for work every single day. Stories abound about how garbage collectors are paid by the weight of the trash they collect, which results in the collector’s coming up with ingenious ways of clearing dumps from one part of the city merely to offload them in another, earning money each time.
The apartment complex I live in abides by strict rules for segregating garbage and for recycling. The residents now have an array of colourful trash cans designated for wet, dry, sanitary and electrical waste, and we proudly display these cans every morning outside our doors, believing we have done our bit for the environment.
Statistics say that urban areas will soon house 40% of India’s population and contribute 75% of India’s GDP by 2030. Many cities have been designated to grow into Smart Cities by the government—integrating information and communication technology to manage transportation, energy consumption, and waste. These cities are on course to make better us of technology to enhance the quality of life of their citizens.
The ‘smart’ garbage revolution
2017 has just gone by—a year that witnessed the rise of populism, the growth of Russian influence in unlikely places while big tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple are fast growing into monopolies. Along with the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), these changes have led to speculation about the survival of humanity and the mastery of machines. AI, when combined with the Internet of Things (IoT), enables devices to learn from recognisable patterns and to respond to queries in natural human language. Such devices can help our cities in more ways than one, with intelligent waste management as only one such example.
Intelligent trashcans, when embedded with IoT sensors, can measure waste levels and then send this data through the Internet to a server for storage and processing. These sensors, through their machine learning capabilities, can read, collect and transmit information about trash volume, which is then processed to optimise the collection and disposal of waste. Sanitation workers then receive the calculated work schedules on their mobile phones. Historical data can even be used to help refine the system’s efficiency.
Apart from the day-to-day operation, information about the rate at which garbage cans are filled can be studied to predict overflow and temperature, the weight of the cans and other factors. In short, the system is optimised to reduce work time and save costs.
Successful projects abroad
The city of Chicago has already been using a monitoring system that gathers data from empty buildings and analyses weather conditions to predict where rats are nesting. Using the forecast data, authorities were able to get to these areas in advance and limit the number of rats while saving costs to the tune of 20% compared to previous reactive methods.
The South Korean city of Songdo uses another method altogether. Citizens tag different types of garbage with coded RFID smart tags, which are read by an automated pneumatic disposal system, Waste is then processed or recycled or burnt as fuel, depending on the data encoded in the RFID tag.
What about the garbage that continues to pile up on the streets? What happens when land is no longer available to process the rubbish? The waste management pyramid must begin with preventing the creation of unnecessary waste, followed by efforts to reuse, recycle, recover and dispose of waste, with the last being the least preferable option. The Environmental Protection Agency in the USA estimates that a third of all waste in the country is already being recycled.
The Campania region in southern Italy has long struggled with municipal waste management problems; the area has been nicknamed the ‘land of fires’ a result of the uncontrolled fires that break out due to the dumping of toxic waste. The EU has fined Campania 85 million euro for its poor environmental record. Pollution caused by toxic waste in the area has also lead to increased levels of cancer in children.
Indian cities must not miss out
This is why it is so critical for cities to look into smart recycling and waste sorting schemes. Thanks to companies like GE, the future of smart recycling is becoming a practical option. GE uses AI and robots to run their recycling facilities. This emerging technology is the future of waste management. If Indian cities are to really modernise then they will have to move in the direction of smart waste management.
Featured Image Source: Flickr