Chor Gene Cheah, Wen Yi Chia, Shuet Fen Lai, Kit Wayne Chew, Shir Reen Chia, Pau

Loke Show,
Innovation designs of industry 4.0 based solid waste management: Machinery and
digital circular economy,
Environmental Research,
Volume 213,
2022,
113619,
ISSN 0013-9351,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envres.2022.113619.
(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001393512200946X)
Abstract: The Industrial Revolution 4.0 (IR 4.0) holds the opportunity to improve
the efficiency of managing solid waste through digital and machinery applications,
effectively eliminating, recovering, and repurposing waste. This research aims to
discover and review the potential of current technologies encompassing innovative
Industry 4.0 designs for solid waste management. Machinery and processes
emphasizing on circular economy were summarized and evaluated. The application of
IR 4.0 technologies shows promising opportunities in improving the management and
efficiency in view of solid waste. Machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence
(AI), and image recognition can be used to automate the segregation of waste,
reducing the risk of exposing labour workers to harmful waste. Radio Frequency
Identification (RFID) and wireless communications enable the traceability in
materials to better understand the opportunities in circular economy. Additionally,
the interconnectivity of systems and automatic transfer of data enable the creation
of more complex system that houses a larger solution space that was previously not
possible such as centralised cloud computing to reduce the cost by eliminating the
need for individual computing systems. Through this comprehensive review-based
work, innovative Industry 4.0 components of machinery and processes involving waste
management which focuses on circular economy are identified with the critical ones
evaluated briefly. It was found that the current research and work done is based on
applying Industry 4.0 technologies on individual waste management systems, which
lacks the coherency needed to capitalise on technologies such as cloud computing,
interconnectivity, big data, etc on a larger scale. Therefore, a real world
comprehensive end-to-end integration aimed to optimize every process within the
solid waste management chain should be explored.
Keywords: Industrial revolution 4.0; Solid waste management; Artificial
intelligence (AI); Machine learning (ML); Internet of things (IoT)