Global Smart Waste Management – Help the Climate By deploying bins which measure their own levels of capacity, compact rubbish accordingly and let administrators know when they need to be emptied, civic authorities can redeploy those resources and identify trends in waste generation for planning purposes. Waste collection has long been a famously inefficient and resource-intensive industry, with cities often either collecting too frequently – wasting fuel and labour while creating needless carbon emissions – or not often enough, leading to overflowing bins and obvious impacts on health, safety and quality of life.
To put the scale of that growth in some context, the bins have captured over 160 million gallons of waste in the last 12 months alone, and over 24 million IoT connections. That is the rationale behind a line of smart bins from Bigbelly, which have been quietly deployed in 60,000 locations across 55 countries since 2003. But more than that, where something as functional and ubiquitous as a rubbish bin can be turned to broader uses – and enable solutions which themselves have no relation to waste disposal – it can become part of the glue that holds a smart city together. As important as just about any other facet of a city’s management, however, is its strategy for waste – get that wrong, and the cities of the future may not turn out to be the gleaming metropolises of artist renditions. Discussions around smart cities tend, perhaps naturally, to focus on the more exciting side of life: the intelligent home which can be personalised in a thousand different ways, say, or the prospect of browsing multimedia in autonomous vehicles.