Design of landfill site monitoring system to study the health effects of greenhouse gases using autonomous sensing nodes

Abstract

India is a second largest populated country and fastest growing economy in the world, with the rapid urbanization, facing a challenge of massive waste management, as the municipal councils are depositing solid waste at dumping yard within or city outskirts haphazardly. Open dumping of solid waste resulted in emission of greenhouse gases like, methane (CH4), Carbon dioxide(CO2), carbon monoxide(CO) and volatile organic compounds(VOCs) that have calculated risks on human health, leads to ground, air and ground water pollution around the landfill sites. In this paper we propose to design an interconnected, interoperable remote monitoring system, to study the effects of greenhouse gas concentration level on human health at the surroundings of solid waste dumping yard/landfill site at Kuppam town (Chittoor (dist), Andhra Pradesh, India). We have conducted the real-time survey on health condition of human beings living at the surroundings of waste dumping yard. In this study, we designed a self-powered autonomous sensing node by incorporating industrial gas sensors & measured the concentration levels of greenhouse gases at the center of the site & 300-500 meters away from the dumping yard. The measured concentration levels of gases are uploaded to the IoT servers, and user-friendly Smartphone application is developed to read the greenhouse gas data from IoT servers using API Keys. Comparison of measured concentration level is made against the standard exposure levels (TLV) with duration, to alert the peoples living at the surroundings of MSW site. Surroundings of MSW site monitoring needs a greater attention to address the health issues related to emission of greenhouse gases from dumping sites. The monitoring system has shown satisfactory result in terms of measurement of concentration levels, its exposure limits with the duration and finding the health effects on human beings.