Promoting an IoT-based waste-bin management system in higher institution

Abstract

The accumulation of waste around faculty and hostels in higher institutions has become a great sense of concern to both staff and students. Often time the scene of the dumb sites is characterized by unpleasant smell and germs that can be harmful to the health status of both staff and students. To maintain the waste collection and proper waste disposal, we propose an IoT-based waste-bin management system. The IoT-based waste-bin management system employed the use of cloud server (Thingspeak) capable of computing, analysing and presenting a graphical representation of waste with the aid of an ultrasonic sensor through the microcontroller unit embedded with WiFi module. The ultrasonic sensor monitors the waste in respect to the time difference between the emitted and receipted wave of the sensor at a frequency of 40 kHz from a distance of 2 cm to 400 cm. The microcontroller samples, digitized and processed the sensor data before being sent over the network to the cloud server. The result obtained is a graphical representation of the status of the waste viewed from both the liquid crystal display (LCD) and the web interface. The graph varies from 25% to approximately 75% filled value of the waste-bin. The system can be used for proper monitoring and for future decisive actions on amount of waste generated. The device is easy to implement due to its cost-effectiveness.