Bins With Eyes: Towards a More Efficient Urban Ecosystem

Cities are complex environments, and as such they often have to deal with compromises. One such compromise is the handling of garbage collection: the population produces garbage, and city authorities usually deal with it in ways that might be apparently efficient in the short term (for instance, prompt weekly collection cycles) but that in fact have hidden drawbacks, like lack of long-term efficiency, and consequent rise of costs and pollution. These drawbacks are not easy to overcome, because finding better solutions relying on smart technologies is not usually cheap, and so greener solutions are not easy to adopt, given their immediate impact on the city budget and the long term benefits versus short term. In this paper we show a solution for a better handling of the problem of garbage collection by making use of special sensor technologies (dubbed “bins with eyes”) in a way that is financially sustainable (and therefore much better acceptable). We show how implementation of this solution in a real urban environment can bring to a much more efficient system, reducing city maintenance costs and, in parallel, producing a better environment.