SGBS: A novel smart garbage bin system for understanding household garbage disposal behaviour

Recently, there is a growing use of smart garbage management systems. Previous work on IoT garbage management systems presents an opportunity to provide a dynamic garbage collection and estimate future garbage growth. However, little attention has been given to understanding users’ garbage disposal behaviour and the type of garbage contents produced and disposed by the households. To examine, we designed and developed a smart garbage bin system “SGBS”, capable of tracking garbage amounts and identifying the contents of garbage disposed. The smart garbage bin was fastened with a ToF (time of flight), DHT22 (temperature and humidity), load cell and air quality sensors for measuring the amount of garbage. Households users used smartphones installed with a garbage annotation application to input the type of garbage contents they disposed. A sigfox antenna module was used as a gateway to send data into a cloud server. The developed system uses energy-saving algorithms with sleep and wake-up cycles to reduce energy usage and increase the lifetime of sensor devices on daily use. To evaluate our approach, we conducted an initial experiment on the smart garbage bin system in three households. Our findings show that households’ garbage disposal behaviour depends on the amount and contents of garbage as well as the routine of disposing such garbage content. We discuss the potential of our system to be scaled in a smart city to influence behaviour change, provide healthier life, and improve garbage management operational efficiency.