Leveraging Intelligent Waste Segregation System for Renewable Energy and Environmental Sustainability

Abstract

The continuous increase in human population across the world’s continents has given rise to the volume of waste generated.
Improper waste management poses environmental and health risk, as such it is paramount to take meticulous measures to manage waste.
Waste segregation facilitates the collection of recyclable materials and the safe disposal of non-recyclable ones. The manual method of
waste segregation is unhygienic, costly, and time-consuming. This work proposes an Intelligent Waste Segregation System to cater for these
setbacks. The proposed system integrates the working principle of inductive proximity, capacitive, and moisture sensors to identify and classify
waste materials into metal, paper, plastic, and wet materials respectively while the Arduino microcontroller serves as the coordinating unit for
all detection and classification activities. This way, the recyclable materials can be collected for further processing and the non-recyclable
wastes can be disposed of in an environmentally friendly manner. The results of multiple tests of the developed system with the identified
materials show 84.4% success rate, which makes it reliable for implementation in real-life systems. Deploying this solution in homes and
industrial environments can foster resource optimization and hygienic waste management for environmental sustainability.