Swachh Survekshan is a pan India annual cleanliness survey that ranks India’s cities, towns and states based on sanitation, waste management and overall cleanliness.
In the latest nationwide cleanliness survey 4,320 cities were covered in 28 days, adding that over 4.2 core people had given their feedback.
Latur, a city in Maharashtra was recognized for its innovative waste management efforts. Awarded by the President of India Ram Nath Kovind. Latur’s Mayor said the city had improved its ranking in the survey from 138 last year to 38 this time due to the united hard work put in by all stakeholders, right from the waste generators to collectors and processors.
Latur’s latest victory is a reason for celebration at Recykal as well. The journey to efficient waste management in Latur was backed by technical support from Recykal. It was a journey of studying the problem and coming up with a digital solution. This solution was aimed towards making the process smoother and gathering data to identify the generators.
Challenge?
Latur Municipal Corporation collects waste from over 30,000 households on a daily basis. It is also home for thousands of bulk waste generators and hundreds of industries.
Even though there is a team of more than 700 people working towards waste management, only half of the waste collected from households is segregated and processed. Rest of the waste remains unprocessed and eventually makes its way to landfills.
Similar situation is seen when it comes to business and industrial waste, here it is collected and processed by private companies. As a result of which no specific data is available regarding the amount of waste collected, processed or disposed.
Attempted Solutions
As we all know now, the most basic solution to proper waste management is efficient segregation at source. To make this happen, the Latur Municipal Corporation introduced dedicated volunteers who walk along with the waste collection truck each day and talk to some of the residents about the segregation process and get a signoff that they are following the process.
Even though this process played an important role in creating awareness, it was not enough. A lot of mixed waste still prevailed, slowing down the overall process, leading to unprocessed mixed waste for the day. Which needs to be moved to the dumping yards at the end of the day, to make space for the new collection for the next day.
A better solution was needed to break this cycle and make a change.
The Final Solution – SmartSkan
SmartSkan is a group of solutions which have proved to be helpful in tackling the waste management system in Latur, to the extent of earning them an award!
The skeleton of the solution is as follows –
- QR Codes Lifecycle
Helps us identify the generator of the waste, quantity of waste generated, the quality of segregation.
Following are the 3 sub-components for this solution:
a) A database of households, uniquely identified. They can be assigned a QR code which can be a combination of their ID, Identification, Location, Ward, Circle details.
b) Bags uniquely identified. Each base coming into inventory is stuck with a unique QR code. This QR is a unique id for the bag.
c) Used bag inventory – all emptied bags would be stacked and cleaned. Then the QR from cleaned bags is scanned and assigned to the next lot.
- Driver Application
It is used for assigning QR and taking pickup requests.
- Center App
This application fulfills the role of capturing QR’s Received, capturing material images, capturing material classification and quality information
- Quality Assessment and Action
The material is unbagged to a table ahead of the conveyor belt and weighed. The images are taken and analyzed to understand the composition of the material. The goal here is to identify the waste composition.
- Reporting & Dashboard
At the ULB level, WM Company Level and center level there are dashboards that show waste collected for the day, composition of the waste collected and the inventory value vs. value realized from sales.
At Recykal, it is our responsibility and pleasure to provide such digital solutions which will make waste management a little bit easier and more accessible.
Is the Urban Local Body or Waste Management Company near you looking forward to working on such projects and building a clean, sustainable future?
Make sure you contact us now!
