International Journal of Engineering & Technology, 7 [2.

29] [2018] 725-729

International Journal of Engineering & Technology

Website: www.sciencepubco.com/index.php/IJET

Research paper

Smart Waste Bin with Real-Time

Monitoring System
Norfadzlia Mohd Yusof1*, Mohd Faizal Zulkifli2, Nor Yusma Amira Mohd Yusof3,
Azziana Afififie Azman4
1,2,3,4
Faculty Of Engineering Technology, Universiti Teknikal Malaysia, Melaka
*Corresponding Author E-Mail: [email protected]

Abstract

This paper presents IoT innovation project of a smart waste bin with real time monitoring system which integrates multiple technolo-
gies such as solar system, sensors and wireless communication technologies. The aim of this project is to provide an efficient and
cost-effective waste collection management system hence providing clean, healthy and green environment. This study proposed a
new framework that enables remote monitoring of solid waste bin in real-time via Wi-Fi connection, to assist the waste management
activity. The system framework is based on wireless sensor network [WSN] contains three segments: renewable energy source, WSN
and control station. Within this framework there are four developed subsystems: solar power system, smart waste bin, short messag-
ing service [SMS] notification system and real-time monitoring system that are interrelated to each other to perform as an efficient,
cost-effective waste management system that yield to a green and healthy living environment.

Keywords: IoT, solid waste management; wireless sensor network; Arduino, ultrasonic; PIR motion sensor; ESP8266 Wi-Fi module; smart waste
bin; GSM/GPRS module, solar

system able to alert the collector only the waste bin requires to be
1. Introduction emptied. Thus, this able to optimize collection routing and save
time and fuel. A system that able to collect and analyze data are
Due to the fast pace of urbanization, waste management is becom- important as a decision support tool to help the local authority or
ing a bigger issue each day in each developed and developing waste management contractor to improve their service. Many
countries. In Malaysia, rapid urbanization and industrialization researches in waste management focus on the solution implemen-
transition have changed the solid waste characteristics [1, 2]. The tation rather than how to deliver a product with competitive price
generation of municipal solid waste [MSW] over the past 10 years with less maintenance cost [5].
has increased by 95 per cent due to rapid development in the urban This paper proposed a new framework for waste management
areas [3]. The waste created from various sources will be lead to system. The designed framework comprises of three main parts:
environmental pollution arising without an effective and well- solar power system, smart waste bin and control station with SMS
organized solid waste management. Besides, this can also bring to notification system and real-time monitoring system. Smart waste
serious health hazard and lead to the spread of infectious diseases. bin uses WSNs to collect waste bin status and transmit waste bin
An effective solid waste management practices need to be updated information wirelessly to the control station. Control station re-
to suit the current waste quantity and composition. Municipal ceives the waste bin information and stores it in the database. SMS
waste management in Malaysia has gone through several transi- notification system is a daemon program to automatically identify
tions [4]. This proved that, Malaysia is striving in improving the the full waste bin and help to send alert notification to garbage
solid waste management practices towards sustainability. collector in real-time, then updates the waste bin status. After the
In the approach of smart city, the objective is to provide a city waste bin has been emptied the smart waste bin will update the
with basic infrastructure to give a decent quality of life, a clean waste bin status and transmit the information again to the control
and sustainable environment through application of some smart station. A web-based application is developed to monitor the
solutions. One of the basic infrastructure is sanitation and solid waste bin status and collection activity. This proposed system able
waste management. Internet of Thing [IoT] can play an important to reduce the development cost since the component used are
role in providing a smart solution for waste management that will cheap.
reduce costs and increase efficiency.
In Malaysia, many companies concentrates on remote sensing
system [5] in waste management system. Alam Flora has started to
2. Literature Review
use Automated Vehicles Locating System [AVLS] to monitor the
collection timing and fleet management and FloraCare system to Several solutions for waste management equipped with IoT facili-
support the company to carry out its operations efficiently [6]. ties have been proposed and invented in the literature to help solid
Producing a cost-effective operation is very important to waste waste management authorities improve the quality of service de-
management companies. Rather than traversing all the route to livery.
clean the waste bin, it is more efficient if the waste management
Copyright © 2018 Authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits
unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
 726 International Journal of Engineering & Technology

Researchers in [7, 8] designed a solid management system uses

WSN integrating two different wireless technologies. Waspmote
[9] from Libeum has been used as sensor node. The mote encom-
passes ATmega1281 microcontroller with built-in accelerometer
sensor. Multiple type of sensors such as level, weight, humidity
and temperature sensors applied at the sensor node using mart
Metering v2.0 board also from Libeum. All data read from sensor
node are transmitted to receiver segment by going through Zigbee
and GPRS communications using Meshlium [10] as a middle
gateway. Receiver segment stored all collected data in database
and displayed it using a developed web application. Thus, solid
waste bin and its real time status can be monitor by using the de-
veloped automated system.
Smart Waste Management System [SWMS] developed by [5]
manipulates geospatial technology and intelligence sensor such as
ultrasonic sensor via IoT technology [9] for reliable Smart City
and M2M solution. A pilot study is conducted by locating the Fig. 1: System framework
SWMS at districts of Sepang and Kuala Langat and limited to
apartment and condominium. SWMS application as a tool for 3.1 Renewable Energy Source
local authority to monitor waste collection operator to ensure
waste collection services is deliver per contract by the service In this segment, a solar power system is built by assembling three
provider. Application of geographic information system [GIS] also components: solar panel, solar charger controller and rechargeable
done by [2] as a decision support tool for planning waste man- battery. Solar panel absorbs the solar energy and converts it into
agement. The proposed system attempts to provide solution of electricity energy. The SR-HM solar charger controller is placed
problems like proper allocation and relocation of waste bin, check between a solar panel and a PROLiNK 12V 1.8AH rechargeable
for unsuitability and proximity convenience to the users and future battery to regulate the amount of charge coming from the panel
suggestions. that flows into the deep cycle battery bank to avoid the battery
Another work by [11] provides a Smart Garbage Monitoring Sys- being overcharged. The solar charger controller also provides a
tem specifically to apartment, condominium or flat type residency direct connection to the sensor system, while continuing to re-
that has trash chute. This proof of concept system uses ultrasonic charge the battery. Solar energy is the cleanest and most available
to measure the waste level and Arduino Uno as microcontroller. renewable energy source. Figure 2 shows the block diagram of
Ultrasonic sensor will continuously measure the waste level and implemented solar power system.
notify the residence and garbage collector regarding the waste
status. This system send notification through SMS to collector
whenever waste bin is almost or already full. Indicator can be put
at each level of the resident to alert the residencies to minimize or
stop dispose waste.
Some researches exploit the power of RFID as a way to improve
and enhance the waste management efficiency especially in moni-
toring the waste collection activities [12-14]. It also may reduce
the workload of truck driver in recording the collection process
and the surrounding area. Not only that, scattered waste around the
dustbin also monitored using IR sensor in [15] and low-cost cam-
era by [13] to maintain the cleanliness and hygiene of city.
Fig. 2: Solar power system

3. Methodology 3.2. Wireless Sensor Network

As a guidelines for proposing the new framework for waste man- The smart waste bin in Figure 3 implements WSN technology
agement system, several problems in waste management will be interfaces with a microcontroller which are fixed in the waste bin.
considered [12-14]: Arduino Mega is the microcontroller used in this subsystem. To
1) Lack of information about the collecting time and area. yield a real time data from waste bin, PIR motion sensor will
2) Lack of proper system to monitor the trucks and trash bins that worked continuously in keeping track the presence of new garbage
have been collected in real time. in the waste bin. When garbage is present, microcontroller in-
3) There is no estimation to the amount of solid waste inside the structed ultrasonic sensor to measure the fill-level inside the waste
bin and the surrounding area due to the scattering of waste. bin and read timestamp from the DS1302 Real Time Clock [RTC]
4) There is no quick response to urgent cases like truck accident, module. Liquid Crystal display [LCD] is used to display the out-
breakdown, longtime idling. put from the microcontroller. Two indicators are initialized by this
5) There is no quick way to response to client’s complaints about subsystem which are waste bin status indicator and SMS notifica-
uncollected waste. tion indicator. To know whether the waste bin is full or empty,
6) There is no analysis of finding best route path of collecting waste bin status indicator will automatically set according to the
waste. fill-level in the waste bin as described in Table 1. Table 2 shows
another important indicator that will automatically initialize by the
The proposed confirmed able to provide solutions to all above smart waste bin which is the SMS notification indicator. SMS
problems. In this paper the framework is used to develop modules notification indicator is used later in the SMS notification system.
for problems 1, 2, 3 and 5. Figure 1 shows the proposed system The combination of these two indicators state three difference
framework. This framework consists of three segments namely the conditions for the waste bin as described in Table 3. The initial
solar power system, smart waste bin and control station. Each part condition of waste bin is always condition 1. Data from smart
is facilitates with subsystems that will execute different tasks. All waste bin which comprise of the waste bin id, fill-level measure-
these segments and subsystems will be further described in the ment, timestamp, status and SMS were then transmitted to the
following section. control station through ESP8266 Wi-fi module as a wireless
communication technology. The smart waste bin is not able to
International Journal of Engineering & Technology 727

work without a power supply. In this framework, solar power

system is used as an environmentally friendly way of producing
electricity for the smart waste bin.

Fig. 4: Architecture of SMS notification system.

3.2.1. Real time monitoring system

The web-based real time monitoring system provides a
GUI for displaying the waste bin data so that user can monitor the
waste bin status and collection activities using web browser from
any devices. This monitoring system is developed using Bootstrap
3 Admin and Dashboard open source template and morris.js dash-
board API. The location of waste bin [latitude and longitude] is
retrieved from database server and marked on the map by using
Fig. 3: Smart waste bin block diagram Google Map API.

Table 1: Waste bin fill-level indicators.

Indicator Threshold Value Description
Status 0% 0 Empty/Not full
>= 80% 1 Full

Table 2: Waste bin SMS notification indicators.

Indicator Value Description
sms NS SMS not sent
S SMS is sent

Table 3: Waste bin conditions. Fig. 5: Architecture of real time monitoring system.
Indicator
Condition Description
status sms
1 0 S Initial or empty 4. Results and Findings
2 1 NS Full and notified
3 1 S Full and not notified The system has been tested to ensure its proper functionality. Fig-
ure 6 shows the overall prototype.
3.2. Control station

The control station contains the central server which hosts the web
server, database, SMS notification system in Figure 4 and a web-
based waste bin real time monitoring system in Figure 5. The data
sent by the smart waste bin is received by the control station and
stored in the database server. Control station runs two systems
which handle different jobs. The systems are SMS notification
system and web-based was bin monitoring system.

3.2.1. SMS Notification System

This is a remote application that is developed in JAVA. To do its
job, this application requires a computer that is directly connected
to external GSM/GPRS SIM900A module. SMS notification sys- Fig. 6: Smart waste bin and real time monitoring system.
tem is daemon program which is configured to continuously query
for waste bin with condition 2 together with garbage collector The smart waste bin only works with Internet connection in order
information [user id, name and mobile phone number] for every 1 to send waste bin data to the control station. Therefore the
seconds, send SMS to the respective garbage collector then update ESP8266 Wi-fi module was used in this project for portability
the waste bin data to condition 3. reason. ESP 8266 Wi-fi module provides a small, low-cost and
effective way to get the Arduino to connect to the Internet wire-
lessly. WifiEsp library is used to allow the Wi-fi connection in the
Arduino. The WifiEsp library are fully compatible with the stand-
ard library of Arduino Wi-fi shield which is expensive. Waste bin
data is send to the control station using the below code fragment:
char server[] = "greenhomestay.com.my";
int s = 0; //0 - empty, 1 - full
String data = "ID_Bin=" + String[id] + "&level=" + String[level]
728 International Journal of Engineering & Technology

+ "&timestamp=" + String[rtc[]] + "&sms=S&status=" +

String[s];
WiFiEspClient client;
if [client.connect[server, 80]] {
client.println["Connected..."];

client.println["POST /add.php HTTP/1.1"];

client.print["Host: "];
client.println[server];
client.println["Content-Type:application/x-www-form-
urlencoded"];
client.print["Content-Length: "];
client.println[data.length[]];
Fig. 9: Waste bin real time monitoring system.
client.println[];
client.print[data];
client.stop[]; 5. Conclusion
}
Figure 7 shows the PIR motion sensor and ultrasonic are placed This paper presents a framework of IoT innovation project for
under the waste bin lid. Therefore, when someone open the lid to waste management system. This novel solution able to enrich the
throw garbage, the movement is detected by PIR motion sensor efficiency of waste bin collection activities and cost reduction.
and the input is send to Arduino. After Arduino received the input, The implemented system on top of this framework can be further
it will output a message “Motion Detected” at the LCD. In the improve to perform real-time, reliable and efficient waste man-
Arduino program a 5 seconds delay is set for user to close the lid agement system. For future works, a customer complaints module
back before Arduino triggers the ultrasonic sensor to measure the will be added and integrates with the SMS notification system to
fill-level in the waste bin and read current timestamp from the perform fast response. The map showing the waste bin actual co-
RTC module. A delay of 5 seconds is set as a relevant epoch for ordinates stored in the database can be further leverage by integra-
user to close the lid back after throwing the garbage. If the lid is tion with GPS technology to give the current waste bin location.
not close an error message will be displayed at the LCD. Alert message can be produce if the waste bin has been reposition
to other place or fall down. Other than that, to solve problem 6, the
map can be used to show only full waste bin together with shortest
route to help reduce operation costs and GhG emission. We also
found several limitation in this implemented system. Firstly, the
smart waste bin should work more intelligently to detect the waste
bin lid is in close or open position. Due to that, in the future a hall
effect sensor can be implemented as in [7, 8] so that the ultrasonic
sensor can give correct reading at any time required. This imple-
mented system also requires strong Wi-Fi connection to make it
functioning. External Wifi-Extender device could be used to im-
prove the Wi-Fi signal [16]. Local authority can use this type of
system and monitor the waste collection status in real-time and
based on the recorded information they able to measure their oper-
ational performance, predict future operation requirements and
Fig. 7: Sensors attached at the waste bin lid. plan for better service to deliver.

To get the current timestamp the DS1307RTC.h and Time.h li-

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