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Abstract—Waste management as well as sorting is a very [5] estimates that producing a paper product from recycled
crucial task to make the environment green and to ensure paper requires only 60 percent of the energy required to create
better (re)use of the resources. Bangladesh, because of its high one from fresh wood pulp. Energy Administration Information
density population, is facing enormous challenges to manage huge
amount of wastes produced every day. So the purpose of this [6] reports that recycling a ton of paper can save 17 trees.
paper is to use the advancement of Information and Communica- However, due to lack of any efficient way of sorting the waste,
tion technology (ICT) to improve the waste management system most of the recyclable products are wasted. This turns out to
and make lives better by providing a smarter way for waste be very harmful for the environment in the long run.
sorting and management. In this paper, an intelligent system was However, in context of Bangladesh, a huge amount of waste
proposed and developed for automatically sorting the waste to be
used in context of Bangladesh. A light weighted experiment was materials are generated every day due to its high population
carried out to evaluate the system performance. The experiment density that have a population of approximately 163 million
replicated with 11 objects (waste) of different size and types. people [7]. To manage these huge waste materials properly,
The experimental results showed that the proposed system was no effective and innovative means are used. Everyday a vast
reliable and achieved about 82% accuracy for the categorization portion of effort and resource of Dhaka City Corporation is
of different kinds of waste.
Keywords—Waste sorting, sensor, robotic arm, automation, invested for properly collecting and processing waste. More-
green environment over, sorting these wastes in to different kind of wastes are
crucial challenge to green the environment of Bangladesh; as
I. I NTRODUCTION because, waste materials that are dumped in the landfill creates
bio-gas that mainly contains methane gas (CH4) which is
Waste materials can be classified in different categories approximately 30 times more overpowering as a heat-trapping
based on their re-usable functionality [1], that includes, (a) gas than Carbon dioxide (CO2) [1], [8]. It is also harmful
recyclable waste like paper, metal, plastic, glass, cardboard for the water body that are around the landfill. Again, waste
are used to recycle and reuse; (b) organic waste are used to generation in Bangladesh is increasing vigorously and it is
make compost for agriculture; and c) non-disposable waste are expected to reach 47, 064 tonnes per day by 2025. The total
not reusable and need to be buried as these are harmful for waste collection rate in major cities of Bangladesh such as
the environment. To ensure the better use of these resources, Dhaka is only 37% [9]. Which is much less than what it
to promote the cost-effective production and cultivation, and should be. Such poor management system can cause health
finally to make the environment green, it is utmost important hazard and major damage to the environment. In Bangladesh,
to categories and manage the wastes in to different category. thus a system of sorting waste materials to reuse or recycle
Waste sorting contributes to recycling and saving energy. may help to save a lot of space, person-effort, air-pollution,
The Aluminum Association [2] estimates that the energy saved land-pollution, and money; which in turn may lead Bangladesh
in recycling a single aluminum can, could be used to power a to move a step forward towards making greener environment.
television for 3 hours. Creating new plastic from raw materials Therefore, the objective of this project is to develop an efficient
requires ten times more energy than the energy needed for automatic system to sort out different kinds of waste to make
recycling plastic [3], [4]. Environmental Protection Agency the environment greener.
978-1-5386-5229-9/18/$31.00 © 2018 IEEE The other sections of this paper are organized as follows.
The work focusing to waste sorting and management are Another system was developed by Russel et al. [19] which
presented in section II. The conceptual design of the proposed could sort metal, paper, plastics and glass. For sorting metal
system is discussed in section III. Section IV presents how the and glass conventional sensors were used and for sorting paper
system was implemented followed by discussion on system and plastics a sensor using LASER and LDR was developed.
evaluation. Discussion and concluding remarks are presented A weight sensor and counter was also there to find out the
in section VI. amount of sorted materials.
In summary, though a number of system has been developed
II. R ELATED W ORKS for waste sorting or management but these are costly, required
high skill to operate and maintain, focused to specific kind
This section briefly summarizes the work related to waste of waste, and developed mainly for developed countries. In
sorting and management. In 2016, Williams & Bentil [10] Bangladesh, no such technology is available to sort the huge
introduced and implemented an automatic waste management amount of waste cost-effectively, efficiently and effectively.
sorting unit using micro-controller. In this design they suc- Even though studies have been conducted in Bangladesh con-
cessfully sorted organic and inorganic waste materials. To do text, there is still no practical implementation. This research
this they used gas sensor which sent data to micro-controller thus aiming to developing an automatic waste management
and using this data garbage was differentiated and used in system considering the economical and contextual situation of
a recycling plant later on. Another work was conducted by Bangladesh.
Elfasakhany et al. [11] on an autonomous system capable of
sorting common recyclable materials, namely ferrous and non- III. C ONCEPTUAL D ESIGN
ferrous metals, plastic and glass into distinct waste containers. A conceptual design to develop an intelligent automated
A micro-controller combined the interfaces of all the system waste sorting system is discussed here. The proposed system
components using programming to control all the system would have a number of features to overcome the limitations of
actions. existing system used in Bangladesh. The features may include
Authors presented the results of a survey in their paper the following:
which showed three alternative methods to sort wastes from 1) Developing a robotic arm that will pick up garbage from
building construction site were presented in [12]. Construction garbage bin and then put it on a conveyor belt. This part
wastes typically consists materials like timber, plaster, iron, of the system will let people not to touch garbage by
cement, plastics etc. Thus, such system will not be useful their hand.
for detecting daily household wastes which includes a large 2) The system will be capable to sort different types of
amount of organic materials. Lukka et al. [13] in 2014, wastes in different baskets basing on their type.
presented a recycler called ZenRobotics Recycler. This robot 3) A mechanism which will be used to differentiate among
could pick up wastes from construction and demolition (CND) different types of waste materials namely plastic,organic
sites and put it on a conveyor belt. It could sort between wood, and metal objects.
stone and metal without any human sorter through machine 4) The system will also include a database that keeps track
learning. of different types of materials that have been detected in
Paulraj et al. [14] proposed an algorithm to detect waste a period of time. This database will help to keep track of
material from an image (captured by thermal imaging camera). how many items are segregated. This data can be useful
A robot was also developed which was equipped with a in recycling.
thermal imaging camera, a proximity sensor and a 5-DOF 5) Apart from this, a mobile app will be developed to
robotic arm. In another work [15], visual features were used operate the robotic arm easily and remotely.
as sorting criteria. In such case, optical sensor and laser beam A flow diagram to represent how the system may work is
were used to detect materials based on their shapes, colors showed in Figure 1. The system will start using a mobile app
and textures and mechanical methods to perform sorting. that will trigger robotic arm to pick garbage from a container
A technology based on optical identification of fluorescence and put it on the detection system to identify its type. The
signature was developed by Ahmad [16] in his work. The sensors in the detection system will detect the object. Then
system was capable of tracing and identifying different kinds the objects will be classified between metal, plastic, organic
of plastic materials using three commercial tracers. However and others based on the sensors output. Depending on the type,
sorting any other kind of material was out of its scope. a rotating surface will rotate and bring the appropriate bucket
Chahine & Ghazal [17] designed and developed an auto- in front of the conveyor belt. After that, the object will be
mated waste sorting system with the use of an inductive prox- dropped in its respective container at the end of the conveyor
imity sensor, a capacitive proximity sensor and a photelectic belt.
sensor. Ang et al. [18] developed automated waste sorter in
2013, which had a mobile robot delivery system. The system IV. I MPLEMENTATION
included a line follower robot which could pick up waste and The proposed conceptual design as discussed in earlier sec-
drop it on a trash can. The system was successful in collecting tion is materialized as depicted in Fig 2. The brief description
the garbage with more than 80% accuracy. of developing each module are presented below:
Fig. 2. Block diagram of the proposed intelligent waste sorting system
at the end of the conveyor belt allowing the waste to fall in it.
Along with this the total count of different types of elements
were saved in a text file. This file was written from the serial
output of the Arduino Uno. Whenever an item was detected
Fig. 4. User interface of the mobile application
it was updated in the text file showing the latest amount of a
specific type of element.
plastic is non- conductive element, no voltage will be passed V. S YSTEM E VALUATION
through it. That is why, output of the voltage sensor will be
zero. On the other hand organic objects are conductive. So The developed system was evaluated in an academic en-
voltage will pass through it and output of the voltage sensor vironment at Software Engineering laboratory of authors’
will be a non zero value. The IR sensor is used to detect institute. To evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the
the presence of any object on the detection system. When the system, 11 types of items(waste) of different dimensions were
output of this sensor is high, the system starts detecting the passed through the system for sorting into different types. The
object type. outcomes are presented in Table 1. The results showed that 9
out of 11 items were detected accurately, i.e. the accuracy of
that system was 81.8%. The results also showed that when
given an object that was mixed with two or more elements,
the detection was not accurate. Also in case of voltage sensor,
sometimes for metal detection, it did not give correct results,
which was not observed with the inductive sensor as it gave
only 1 or 0 as output.
The output of the voltage sensor is showed in Fig 7. In
case of organic materials, the voltage sensor output fluctuates,
for reading 1, it was 3.39 volts and for reading 2 it was 2.01
volts, reading 3 it was 1.32 volts and so on. But for plastic
and metal, the output curve was almost constant around 5.00
and 0.00 volts respectively. However, preference was given to
the inductive sensor while detecting metal objects.
Item No Object Type Dimension(cm2 ) Voltage Sensor(Volts) Inductive Sensor IR Sensor Detected Type Success
1 Aluminium Foil Metal 6x6 4.91 1 1 Metal Yes
2 Watermelon Organic 6x1.5 3.39 0 1 Organic Yes
3 Bottle Cap Plastic 5x5 0.00 0 1 Plastic Yes
4 KeyRing Metal 3.5x3.5 5.01 1 1 Metal Yes
5 KeyRing Plastic 3.5x5.6 0.06 0 1 Plastic Yes
6 Badge(Metal and Plastic) Mixed 5.8x5.8 0.99 1 1 Metal No
7 Apple Organic 5x1.2 2.01 0 1 Organic Yes
8 Leaf Organic 6x3.2 1.32 0 1 Organic Yes
9 Coin Metal 2x2 5.09 1 1 Metal Yes
10 Cucumber Organic 2x1 0.99 0 1 Plastic No
11 Container Plastic 5x4 0.00 0 1 Plastic Yes
detect only one item at a time. So there lies scope for future
improvement in this regard as well. Finally, the system can
segregate three types of elements at present, thus feature to
detect more types of waste can be included to improve the
overall performance and efficiency.
R EFERENCES