The Sustainable Development Goals laid out by United Nations aims to achieve sustainable living conditions in all countries by 2030. Nowadays, climate change and accelerated environmental deterioration is triggering the scientific community and other stakeholders to invest and formulate policies and strategies for efficient environmental management. Solid waste management is one of the challenging and serious issues among other environmental issues and poses a threat to environment considering the drastic increase in amount of waste being generated.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the climbing technological trends of 21st century with its application ranging from small to large scale problems. AI is the capability of a machine to mimic human characteristics like gaining from certain examples and skill, distinctive things, comprehending and responding to language, selections and determination issue. It is a tool that people utilize all over the world to help them take data driven decisions. Because artificial intelligence can analyze extensive information at a much faster rate than a human. The waste management sector has taken on a new structure as a result of current circular economy (CE) techniques, which create value from trash generated. One of the major problems is the transformation into circular economy, particularly in terms of sorting and classifying generated garbage, and in this case AI can help to a greater extent.
With the rise in population and urbanization in India, waste management has become a major issue, especially in the urban areas. Over the years, there has been a significant increase in the quantity of waste generated and it is further expected to increase in the coming years.
Currently, as per government estimates, about 65 million tons of waste is generated annually in India, and over 62 million tons of it is Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) (organic waste, recyclables like paper, plastic, wood, glass, etc.). Only about 75-80% of the municipal waste gets collected; out of this only 22-28% is processed and treated. The remaining MSW is deposited at dump yards. By 2031, MSW generation is projected to increase to 165 million ton, and further up to 436 million ton by 2050. The waste collection efficiency needs to catch up with the increasing quantity of waste generated in India. It ranges from 70 to 90% in major metro cities and is below 50% in many smaller cities as of now.
Smart sensors and IoT (Internet of Things) devices are one of the core elements of waste management using AI, using these sensors and IoT devices combined with AI it is very easy to ensure efficiency in solid waste management. In particular, the smart sensors can help in:
- Easily manage the waste containers/trucks which provide the real-time data on various parameters
- Track the fill level, inside temperature, unsolicited movement and location and any risk of fire from the all-in-one platform
ElixirAI’s SWM solution provide the best asset management solution, which covers smart sensors and waste container/truck management. With usage of AI through IoT in smart sensors municipality can avoid any possible damage and which will boost productivity in overall waste management processes.
The second AI solution for the optimization of productivity in the solid waste management is the fleet management solution. Traditionally, the waste truck/container fleet spends hours every day around the roads. Is it efficient? How can we maximize effectiveness in the fleet management by utilizing AI technologies? Here is ElixirAI’s solution: The ElixirAI SWM solution provide the best fleet management solution by using block chain technology, IoT devices, AI and smart sensors:
- Control every single step of entire fleet
- Provide the waste truck drivers with optimized route planners for each day
- Ensure that fleet management maximizes efficiency with routing optimization software
- Optimize cost reduction in the business by accurate data provided by AI
The third AI solution uses the Geo-intelligence, which combines the Artificial Intelligence and Geospatial technology. The overall aim of this solution is to provide alerts on solid waste dumps and further classify them into categories like domestic, industrial, etc. This helps in monitoring the solid waste dumps periodically. We use very high resolution temporal satellite images or drone images to feed into our image feature extraction engine which is developed based on AI models. This Geo-AI SWM model is trained in such a way that it first detect and recognize for any solid waste dump and then use this information to further classification. The areas identified as solid waste are further feed into the model, which tells about the type of solid waste dump i.e., domestic waste, industrial waste, or medical waste. Once this information is derived, the model also gives the longitude, latitude and geographical area (in square meters) and pin point these solid waste dumps on a geographic map such as google map. The location of these identified dumps are then shared with concerned authorities like municipal corporations, other agencies handling the SWM for that particular locality.
(The author is Ms. Mayurakshi Das, CEO & Co Founder, Elixir AI and the views expressed in this article are her own)
