ESS-IoT: The Smart Waste Management System for General Household

Abstract

With the urban population’s growth, unethical and unmanaged waste disposal may negatively impact the environment. In many cities, a massive flow of people in municipal buildings or offices has generated vast amounts of waste daily, which correlates to the enormous expenses of waste management. The critical issue for better waste management is waste collection and sorting. In this study, the Electronic Smart Sorting-Internet of Things (ESS-IoT) is proposed to assist people in better waste management. The ESS-IoT system uses Raspberry Pi 4b as the microcontroller with three modules, and it is designed with two main functions: waste collection and waste classification. The two main functions have been deployed separately in the literature, while this study has combined both functions to achieve a more comprehensive smart bin waste disposal solution. Waste collection is triggered by the overflow alarm mechanism that employs ultrasonic and tracker sensors. On the other hand, the waste classification is implemented using two classification algorithms: Random Forest (RF) prediction model and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) prediction model. An experiment is conducted to evaluate the accuracy of the two classification algorithms in classifying various types of waste. The waste materials under investigation can be classified into four categories: kitchen waste, recyclables, hazardous waste, and other waste. The results show that CNN is the better classification algorithm between the two. Future work proposes the research extension by introducing an incentive mechanism to motivate the household communities using a cloud-based competition platform incorporated with the ESS-IoT system.