From Smart City to Smart Citizen: Rewarding Waste Recycle by Designing a Data-Centric IoT based Garbage Collection Service

Abstract

As overpopulated cities spread all over the world, recycling has become crucial. Day by day, waste production is rising while resources are becoming limited, making recycling not only a sensible practice but a necessity. In order to be effective, the recycle process needs to start with the efforts of every single citizen, who is, however, often slightly motivated or forced by a punish-based system. In this paper, we propose a reward-based data-centric solution based on both enabling IoT technologies and cloud architectures to promote waste recycling in urban environments. We extend the consolidated rewarding approaches based on the smart bin model by proposing an incentive system that focuses on door-to-door waste collection. Such a solution assists door-to-door garbage collection by using practical and affordable QR-codes and IoT sensors to accumulate and track all the fundamental data related to garbage, such as waste composition (paper, plastics, glass, etc.), bag weight, etc. As recycling is properly handled by citizens, they can be rewarded with an adequate tax relief. The user is given means to monitor his progress by a smartphone app; whereas the waste management company and municipality can monitor their target amounts for each waste category and e.g. provide citizens with incentive to adjust the growth rate of different materials to be collected.