Waste & material traceability solution for sustainable facilities
As humans our lives have been a series made of producing consuming disposing stages since the first settlement of early humans. We produce what we need, then consume and dispose it in different ways to sustain our lives. In this linear process we cared about our environment and other living things very little to none until the last few decades. We created the concept of waste management in the 17th century to put the waste we create aside to make it occupy less space and not directly visible to ourselves.
In the early 1970s we started to consider changing our waste management style as the methods we have been using started to cause problems that needed immense attention & created a new concept named recycling. Recycling offers the chance to use a material more than one time which will lead to less use of resources & less problems caused by the waste management & disposal. If implemented well this new concept could help us to make the waste management more sustainable and less harmful to the environment.
Years passed and we didn’t give enough importance to this new concept and our landfills or waste management became insufficient and we spread and disposed of our waste everywhere. Even we created 5 new continents made of the waste we dispose of which is expected to have more plastics in number than the fishes all around the world by the year of 2050. The biggest one of these waste / plastic patches or continents, the pasific patch has reached the size of the United States.
In order to make our waste management methods more sustainable and prevent the future problems caused by our waste disposal and production, we need to understand What waste management is and how smart waste management practices can be helpful to make it more sustainable.
Waste management is the process of several activities such as collection, transport, processing or disposal of waste materials to manage the last version of a product. It starts with collection of waste, transporting waste materials to recycling or waste management centers and processing it for second use or disposing it.
In a traditional waste management process, the waste gets collected and transported to landfills or dumped into oceans without a second use which is not sustainable and also is harmful to the environment. When a product is used for a single time it is a waste of raw materials since we have limited resources, mass single use product production may lead to scarcity of these materials. When these products are disposed of in landfills or oceans they occupy a mass amount of space and jeopardize the environment at the same time.
To make this process more and make raw materials usage more sustainable recycling comes to mind in different ways. Citizen applications is one of the easiest ways to be implemented to make it more sustainable.
Citizen applications are in general built to meet citizen needs in many areas to improve quality of living. They offer affordable and approachable methods for citizens to be more involved in their local community and manage their needs.
Citizen applications are already in use in many places around the world as waste management applications. On the citizens side it offers the chance to make inquiries to waste management applications provider in case of a specific need or problem related waste management. On the waste management provider side it allows them to come up with different pricing and collection strategies in waste management to ensure sustainability. With different pricing policies based on the data or inputs provided by the waste management applications, it becomes easier to make citizens adapt to new recycling policies or encourage them to recycle as an optional initiative.
Normally, when waste is managed and collected in mass amounts with traditional methods, the prices charged to the consumer are fixed for districts and not effective in promoting sustainability. In the concept of Differentiating Waste Management Pricing it is possible to track waste disposing behaviours of the consumer through using smart bins. Smart bins provide real time data of all waste bins using smart hardwares such as sensors to view the type or material of the waste and also the available bin capacity.
These collected data makes it feasible and easy to create different waste management pricing, different neighborhoods are charged depending on their disposal activities and also reduces the time, money and effort used to process the waste collected in recycling or generic waste management/ disposal activities.
Waste management industry also uses raw materials to sustain its own operations as well. As an example even in the collection phase if the routes created for waste trucks are not planned flexibly depending on the live data, the trucks stops in bins which are not used in full capacity or they may serve more than needed to specific routes. This unoptimized implication causes waste of fuel which is one of the greatest costs in waste management. If the fuel is saved more through algorithm managed route optimization softwares, the money & resources saved may be used in different areas of waste management or even in other industries to make the process more efficient and sustainable.
These practices and many others are already available and ready to use for all industries including waste management through smart hardware & software solutions.These solutions can benefit your business and the world through more cost-effective implications to ensure sustainability and efficiency.
As Evreka we provide smart hardware and software solutions to ensure waste management optimization and sustainability to leave a cleaner world for the future generations! Start building the future now!
