Louise Davis
Technology has become one with the society today. No matter what industry you’re in, it will eventually come along the way and change the course of handling business. With the help of technology, people are living comfortably.
Nowadays, you can use technology for almost everything, including waste management. The world has over seven billion individuals, and as you can imagine, those people produce millions of tons of trash in a day. With technology today, businesses can track their trash by using smart waste management technology.
There are countless ways to improve recycling rates and reducing waste. But with the use of smart waste management technology, it can help cut costs and reduce your business’s environmental impact. With the increasing landfill closures and rising pollution, here are five technological advances that could help manage waste for a better society.
Automatic Motion Sensor Trash Cans
Many companies that manufacture waste management equipment now create motion-activated trash cans with a sensor that can identify how full your waste container is at all times. This sensor also allows you to monitor the space limit of your container from anywhere. With that reason, it can provide specific analytics to help your organization and business track your waste.
The importance of having this type of system is to organize and establish an excellent platform to help people track their waste and avoid overfilling. Having complete visibility of your container’s waste from anywhere could help you manage your trash better.
Using RFID (Radio-Frequency Identification) Tracking
The use of radio-frequency identification tracking or RFID in waste management has boomed in the past five years. With RFID technology, nonhuman interaction is possible, especially in providing data to solid waste pickup and collection activities. A garbage truck with an RFID reader can easily recall and identify which trash cans you need to pick up.
Every garbage truck has an electronic record of the truck’s route which registers and verify the pickups. If you install an RFID on recycling bins, you can also track the rate of who participated, and you will know who follows the rule of recycling. At the end of the route, you can determine the number of recyclables and where those items came from.
If you determine the count of waste materials, you can compute how many recyclables there are per household. The information you get from RFID can help analysts see what demographics are cooperating in recycling programs. In this way, you can easily compare a neighborhood regardless of how many homes there are.
The Use of Robotics and Optical Sorting
Many countries such as Japan and China specialize in robotics. Nowadays their technology is one of the most advanced in the entire world. They have innovations which can help maintain cleanliness in the environment. One of these is robotics and optical sorting. China, being one of the strictest countries when it comes to recycling waste, became an inspiration to all.
In line with China’s efforts in tightening the recycling specifications, the waste industry is starting to adopt the possibilities and develop alternative markets to focus on quality. By improving quality, many facilities will try to upgrade their recycling equipment to reduce contamination.
The future of waste management will become more successful because of these upgrades. It will also include other sophisticated technology offerings such as film separation, robotics with artificial intelligence, improved screens, and more excellent optical sorting.
Converting Waste into Energy
One of the most significant innovations the waste management industry created is the conversion of waste into energy. Instead of piling up trash on a landfill, there are particular types of waste you can convert into energy. A machine called “Digesters” can take waste to produce biogas and turn it into energy.
The “Digesters” can take a variety of waste including agricultural leftovers, animal waste, food waste and more. One other recycling technology is the thermal conversion which can convert waste into specialty products. Its process is to take cues from natural geothermal methods that use heat and pressure to turn waste materials into useful products.
You can also perform a thermal conversion to convert waste into fertilizer, oils, chemicals, and many other things that could give waste materials a purpose.
The Use of Mechanical Biological Treatment
A lot of communities are seeking for zero waste scenarios, which they realize that most of the waste is a complex mixture of organic and inorganic materials that can’t be separated easily. Fortunately, there is MBT (Mechanical Biological Treatment) that covers a wide range of technologies and activities to dispense residual wastes.
MBT is an approach that integrates both mechanical and biological processes to sort out wastes. The mechanical sorting stage involves processing or separating recyclable materials from mixed waste streams like plastics, metals, paper, and glass. In some cases, the sorting process is manually done at hand picking stations. The biological stage is where the anaerobic digestion or composting of waste materials takes place.
The ultimate goal for most communities is to achieve high cost for landfills or zero waste count to landfills. If you mix it with waste processing facilities like MBT which can generate alternative commodities, then it will be a successful process. Further, proper use of MBT technologies can help in cutting off the contribution of greenhouse gasses to global warming.
Takeaway
Pollution is becoming an uncontrollable adverse change that’s happening in the world today. Even if you say that your neighborhood is perfect with zero waste count, there are still a lot of places that need help. Therefore, start using one these five technological advances to manage the waste count in your community and help restore the environment.