How to Use Smart Waste Management Systems to Achieve Cleaner Cities?

The world's population is becoming urban and experts estimate that by 2050, 66% of the population will live in urban areas.

The biggest problem with the urban population is that they produce much more than the rural population. In fact, even only in 2014, New York City spent $ 2.3 billion in waste management. We must consider that this amount is part of the city's waste management budget. This size benefits from the combination of public and commercial waste management services and is an important part of the city's total budget of $ 75 billion.

New York City isn't our only example. In 2016, the urban population in the world produced 2 trillion tons of solid waste and this number is expected to increase to 3.4 trillion tons by 2050. This is not only a problem that is unique to high-income countries, but too much waste is generally produced in the world. By the end of 2050, even waste generated in low-income areas is expected to increase more than 3 times.

Statistics and expectations clearly show that urbanization is the largest source of waste products in the world. And even if we assume that the financial aspect of the problem has completely disappeared between cities and municipalities, the problem is still unresolved from an environmental perspective.

It is very clear that traditional methods of urban waste management can’t keep up with the problem. We need a smarter way of waste management and clearly, we have to start by focusing on cities and how they collect and manage their waste.

 

The Solution to Efficient Waste Management: Evreka

Collecting garbage in urban areas contributes to a major part in cities’ waste management expenses. The problem is that the systems cities use to collect garbage are old and dated. In the present, all the garbage bins and dumpsters are visited periodically by field employees and garbage trucks. This requires a considerable amount of labor force, equipment, vehicles, and fuel.

But the problem with the garbage cans and dumpsters in the cities is that they do not fill up at the same speed. The garbage or waste produced in different areas in a city varies widely. This is even the same for the garbage containers in different locations on the same street. But nevertheless, cities allocate resources to be able to visit all the dumpsters, garbage containers, waste bins at the same frequency, at the same time.

This is not only a huge problem regarding budget but also a problem of service quality. Since the waste containers don’t fill up at the same speed, current methods of the waste collection also create overflowing problems since the containers that fill up earlier have to wait until scheduled collection time.

There is an easy way to solve this problem with optimization. Evreka Smart Waste Management Systems can optimize the waste collection processes with the utmost efficiency and help cities update their ways of the waste collection according to the requirements of the digital age that we live in.

 

How Does Evreka Smart Waste Collection System Work?

Evreka Smart Waste Collection System consists of sensors that are installed on garbage containers. Tablet-like devices in garbage collecting vehicles and an easy to use management software. The sensors are very durable against heat, shock, and water so they can handle any abuse or misuse of the containers.

These sensors collect location, temperature and fill ratio info and send it to the main cloud servers. This real-time information can be used in many ways to increase the efficiency of waste collection processes. For instance; they can be used to optimize the routes of the vehicles in a more efficient way. The data can also be used to estimate the frequency that a garbage container should be visited. Moreover, the system can predict when a specific container will fill up based on past data. By the real-time information that Evreka provides, cities can also eliminate the overflowing problem completely.

Evreka Smart Waste Collection System also has environmentally friendly effects such as reducing carbon emissions. Waste collection operations managed by Evreka can reduce costs and carbon emissions from the waste collection by up to 70%. The backup budget created with optimization can be reallocated to further improve service quality.

Evreka Smart Waste Collection & City Cleaning is not only reduced costs and environmental impacts, but also helps create cleaner cities by eliminating overflow problems.

References:

http://www.columbia.edu/~sc32/documents/ALEP%20Waste%20Managent%20FINAL.pdf

https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/30317/9781464813290.pdf

http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/news/population/world-urbanization-prospects-2014.html