Waste Management solutions in a Smart City

By Rebecca Madden, Third-Year Architecture student

Smart Cities was a concept that I hadn’t heard off until this year’s studio modules. To understand these cities, I first had to look to the key characteristics that make up a smart city. You might be wondering what makes a city “smart”. A Smart City uses data collecting technology also known as IoT (Internet of Things). This technology analyses  the data in order to improve our everyday experience of cities, reduce our carbon footprint, and enhance our sustainability standards.

A Smart City uses KPI’s (key performance indicators) to measure their success to be Net Zero.

One piece of IoT technology that really fascinated me is waste management solutions.  Although there were many different technologies, I narrowed my interest down to the Big Belly Bin. The Big Belly Bin is a smart and less complex IoT technology that have been integrated into Smart Cities. Below is a diagram showing how the big belly bin works.

After carrying out this research, it invoked me to dive in deeper, to investigate where our rubbish goes and how it affects the world we live in. I had always known that our rubbish goes to landfills, but I wanted to understand what we could do to combat our waste (as landfills become overcrowded) and how we can keep the circular economy going for as long as we can.

One IoT technology that I heard of in my second year of university was the waste to energy facility, done by Bjarke Ingels. I fell in love with this idea of a multi-functional building and its technology. When researching the building for a module, my mind was blown away to find out how our waste can be turned into energy and how it could provide power to surrounding buildings. Not only does it provide energy but provide aggregates dust that is used to create  concrete. This type of technology uses an incinerator which uses the combustion heat through a boiler to generate  steam. The steam travels to a steam turbine that generates power for electricity.

What I discovered

During this investigation I discovered food waste can no longer go to landfill nor can it go to incinerators as there is  a better way and much easier way to handle our waste.

Less than half of our food waste is recycled into biogas or compost. When our food ends up on landfills it releases Methane emissions that are 25 times worse than Carbon Dioxide. Methane emission is a greenhouse gas. The problem with incinerating food is that it emits greenhouse gases  and eliminates the use of nutrient re-use.

You may be asking, so what can I do?

Composting is a perfect way of eliminating our methane emissions. A compost bin allows our food waste to decompose and turn to compost which can be used be used to grow herbs and can be used as a fertiliser.