Leveraging Intelligent Waste Segregation System for Renewable Energy and Environmental Sustainability
Olaitan O Afolabi · FUOYE Journal of Engineering and Technology · 2024
The continuous increase in human population across the world’s continents has given rise to the volume of waste generated. Improper waste management poses environmental and health risk, as such it is paramount to take meticulous measures to manage waste. Waste segregation facilitates the collection of recyclable materials and the safe disposal of non-recyclable ones. The manual method of waste segregation is unhygienic, costly, and time-consuming. This work proposes an Intelligent Waste Segregation System to cater for these setbacks. The proposed system integrates the working principle of inductive proximity, capacitive, and moisture sensors to identify and classify waste materials into metal, paper, plastic, and wet materials respectively while the Arduino microcontroller serves as the coordinating unit for all detection and classification activities. This way, the recyclable materials can be collected for further processing and the non-recyclable wastes can be disposed of in an environmentally friendly manner. The results of multiple tests of the developed system with the identified materials show 84.4% success rate, which makes it reliable for implementation in real-life systems. Deploying this solution in homes and industrial environments can foster resource optimization and hygienic waste management for environmental sustainability.