Smart Bins: The Key to Cleaner Cities?

#News(Startup) [ via IoTForIndiaGroup ]

Could the secret to cleaner cities be found in our trash? Lidbot, a Taiwanese developer of smart sensors for rubbish bins, thinks so. Find out why.

Once labelled ‘Garbage Island’ following its rapid industrialisation in the 20th century, Taiwan has now become a leader in waste management as the birthplace of innovative, smart city startups such as Miniwiz, Bionicraft and Osense, all founded in Taipei. Newest on the block is Lidbot. Started in Taiwan in April 2018 by Ham Karami, its proposition is to install sensors in bins around the city to track and record waste management data, providing information that can then be used to optimise waste and recycling systems.

Curbside waste collection is a complex problem and it was being treated with no insights. For businesses, that means time and manpower spent collecting waste and recycling bins when it’s not necessary. For cities, fixing this means lowering the cost of collection and also having fewer cars on the road and for shorter time periods. Don’t be fooled – the amount of dollars saved is in the millions,” he explains.

With his Lidbot sensors, Ham proposes to do just that. Each sensor costs less than USD 50 and lives on the underside of a bin’s lid – just as the name would suggest. Their sensors are fitted with a globally connected SIM, meaning they’re able to transmit data to over 156 countries through a cellular reception, while the actual data collected is able to distinguish between solids and liquids with a tolerance of just a millimetre. Once installed, it measures the distance between itself and the level of waste, a deceptively simple big data point that can then be extrapolated to give a lot of information. “Lidbot gives real-time data and updates on our waste and recycling. This data then helps make optimisations. For instance, if a manufacturing plant were to make a change in its system, it could use Lidbot to measure the effects of that change and see how much waste was prevented.” For example, with the knowledge of which bins are full and which are not, simple optimisations like redesigning bin changing routes enable greater efficiency all around, reducing unnecessary traffic on the ground and decreasing waste overflows.

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