Smart and green urban solid waste collection system for differentiated collection with integrated sensor networks

Urban solid waste prevention and recycling are needed at the local scale rather than heavily relying on the treatment and disposal at the regional scale. Differentiated collection is necessary but complicates the current schemes of waste collection. To bridge this gap and construct an efficient, effective, and sustainable scheme, this study developed a smart and green system (SGS) which embodies the in-depth integration of various informatics and the strategy of sustainable waste management. The proposed SGS is able to gather the massive volumes of data and information from different application scenes of waste separation and differentiated collection, with the aid of sensor network technologies to timely detect state parameters throughout a waste collection system and the rate of waste separation and recycling. In-network data processing and cloud computing contribute to managing the communications among all collection nodes, vehicles, and crews in a secure, scalable and highly-available environment. The proposed SGS can deal with well-structured, semi-structured, and even poorly structured problems in a more efficient, collaborative, and resilient way with the aid of a position-navigation-timing system. Integrated three-level SGS architecture with a scalable sensor network is proposed in this study as an instruction of developing SGS for sustainable waste management.