Design and Fabrication of an Automatic Waste Segregation and Monitoring System

The quantity and composition of solid waste are increasing rapidly due to continuous economic development in many countries. Variation in quantity and composition of waste has become a serious problem for the waste management system in ensuring effectual and eco-friendly management of solid waste. The world generated approximately 2.01 billion tonnes (BT) of solid waste in 2016, which is anticipated to increase to 2.58 BT by 2030 and 3.40 BT by 2050. Currently, only one-fifth of the waste generated is being processed and the rest is dumped in landfills without any treatment. The optimal economic benefit derived from solid waste is attained when all its components are thoroughly segregated. Waste segregation at source helps significantly in reducing complexity in waste treatment plants. There is no system for segregating dry, wet, organic, plastic, and metallic waste at household, office, college, and industrial levels. So, the goal of this paper is to design, fabricate, and testing of an easy-to-use and cost-effective automatic waste separation system for homes and small local societies so that waste can be directly sent to the waste management plants. This system minimizes human interference and shortens the time and cost of segregation. Powered by Arduino UNO and various sensors, this system easily separates solid waste into three main categories namely metal, dry, and wet. During the performance testing of the system, the accuracy of the system was noted at 98% for 100 samples and also the time taken by the system to separate metal waste, wet waste, and dry waste respectively was 2.5, 3.5, and 5.6 seconds.