FoxBin (Sigfox for smart dustbin)

OVERVIEW

Good waste management has become an essential issue for our planet. In public and natural spaces, many do not pay attention to the waste they leave behind. Poor waste management and trash surveillance may harm all living organisms destroying the flora and fauna of our beautiful planet.

The Unobserved Disaster in India

1) In India, one of the most striking images is the cow, dogs, bull wandering on the road. India has an open garbage system, which means open garbage bins on the roads overflowing with stinking waste. Dogs, monkeys, pigs, rats and cows eat whatever they can find to survive. India also has fewer government and NGO services that deal with stray dogs.

2) An estimated 35 million stray dogs live in India and according to World Health Organisation (WHO) India faces about 18,000 to 20,000 cases of rabies every year. According to the WHO report an estimated 45 % of all deaths from rabies occur in South- East Asia out of which about 36 % of the world’s deaths from rabies happen in India itself.

3) Since plastic bags have invaded our lives, almost all garbage and food waste is disposed in plastic bags. These bags spill out either on the road or from municipality dustbins. Since the plastic bags are knotted at the mouth, street animals, unable to undo the knot, eat food leftovers including the plastic. Slowly, over time, they build up a huge amount of plastic inside their stomachs.

4) Sometimes small animals also get trapped inside the dustbin and often leading to their death.

In developing countries(less economy countries like Africa, India and many others) waste management is one of the biggest problem to tackle.

With the increase in demand of facilities, resources and food we are putting our self in an unsafe zone by contributing toward the waste formation. Each and every year tons and tons of waste are generated but only about 30-40% of it is recycled.

Garbage has become a serious problem in the world today. According to a report published in Nature journal, the problem of garbage or solid waste is assuming terrible proportions today. By the end of this century (2100,), garbage will be collected at the rate of 11 million tons per day globally, more than three times today’s rate. It implies that the garbage-generation which amounted to 3.5 million tons per day in 2010 will become 6 million tons per day by 2025. At present, people of India produce about 62 million tons of solid-waste annually. Out of this, 45 million tons of the garbage are left untreated and disposed of by civic agencies in an unscientific manner.

According to the report, urban India generates 109,589 tons of waste per day. Interestingly, the urban US produces 624,700 tons of garbage per day, which is the highest in the world, while the second largest happens to be urban China with 520,548 tons per day. India’s waste-generation will be more than 376,639 tons per day by 2025, especially with the population of urban India expected to increase to 538 million.Moreover, trash accumulation may result in providing homage to the most deadly animal of the planet (mosquitoes) which alone contributes in the death of millions of people. Mosquito breed in the optimum temperature ranging between 24°C- 28°C, they need very less water to breed even few drops of it is enough which the trash bins can easily provide. The most dangerous insect in the world is the mosquito. While mosquitoes carry a variety of nasty pathogens, the big killer is malaria. Fortunately, only the Anopheles mosquito transmits the deadly disease. According the survey published by WHO, there were an estimated 219 million cases of malaria in 87 countries.

To preserve natural areas, it is important to provide well-managed waste collection points :

• To prevent them from overflowing, the bins must be raised regularly. It is hard to get through the right time : too soon, and the trash can be empty, too late and the trash can overflow. This problem is all the more critical when the bin is difficult to access (such as on hiking trails in the mountains)
• In this rational waste management, sorting can be a major challenge. Organics waste can be directly processed by nature, in composting. Non organics waste must be collected to be treated by specific processes.

OUR APPROACH TOWARD THE PROBLEM

The devised a project to provide a real-time analysis device for intelligent waste bin. This device integrates several sensors to supervise the state of the trash.

• Level sensor: Based on IR system, used to prevent overflows by alerting the garbage collection team.
• Temperature and humidity sensor: Used to monitor the trash environment. This can be useful to manage the condition of organic compost, and to prevent contamination in some specific case (very wet or hot conditions, risk of fire in very dry conditions)
• Flame sensor: Some may deposit incandescent waste (like cigarette butts) or may intentionally set fire to the bin. A garbage fire can have dramatic effects on the environment (for example it can cause a forest fire). The flame sensor can alert supervision team about the problem.
• Pir sensor: Used to detect the presence of living organisms like cows, dogs, humans and calculate the time of their movement if our device gets continuous signal its algorithm will trigger and may predict whether the organism feeds on the trash or not.
• Sound sensor: Used to detect for the noise from the surrounding and determines the presence of the organism. Sends the confirmation message whether they feed on the trash or not. Its second purpose is to detect the natural frequency of mosquito and to pass through the codes to detect the presence of mosquito and decide whether the bin can be the breeding ground for them or not.
• Wanted to add the location tracking method provided by SigFox but there is no setup of SigFox in India.

Sigfox Usage

The trash will be installed in the isolated areas. The power will be provide by battery, possibly connected to a solar panel. For us, Sigfox seams to be a very good solution :

• Sigfox communication system has a wide area coverage : it allows to deploy the project on a large scale.
• Sigfox system provides sufficient communication capabilities for our use case.
• Sigfox can provide a 100m localization solution : not necessary to add a GPS shield on the bin.
• Sigfox is a low power solution, which allows the device to operate a long time autonomously.

Hardware Design and Working

Step 1: Wiring