IT Operations for Swill Waste Management.

Assignment Taken

IT Operations for Swill Waste Management.

Case Understanding

Bhopal has population of over 26 lakhs approx. which is spread across 2,772 sq km. This consists of 19 lakh urban population and 4 lakh rural population. Hence considering the large urban population and Bhopal being the capital of Madhya Pradesh, it will have high number of hospitals, schools and government offices, that generate a lot of waste. This pertains to large waste collection and considerable opportunities for waste to wealth creation. Various stage at which our company can help in the ‘Waste to Wealth’ initiative is as follows. 1) The waste being collected is not converted to sustainable and use-full products. Currently, about 275 tons of waste is being treated by centralized composting center at Bhanpur and 25 tons of waste is treated via decentralized methods. However, these can be treated correctly and made to good use. Bhopal needs systems that can help reap benefits out of its waste, so that the waste can give something back to the city 2) Even though the literacy rates in Bhopal is high, just relying on the population to properly segregate the waste is not the correct approach. The segregation doesn’t happen correctly at the very first ground level making it even tougher to convert this waste into use-full by products. We will take the help of automation (with little human intervention if required) to segregate this waste before processing them further. 3) The already set routes to collect the waste from specific households/localities work perfectly fine. But we also need to work on increasing the efficiency of our waste collection and conversion. What if some new areas are set up which produce considerable amount of waste and it can be used to escalate our produce? This is where the users can help us.

BCS Solution Summary

Our idea of Waste to Wealth circulates around enabling integrated waste management, along with wealth creation for the key stakeholders like government, citizens and the company. The waste management beings at the very grass root level that is the households. We would need government collaboration (Public-Private-Partnership model) to educate the people about the new waste management initiative that we are intending to introduce. We will have colored stickers to be attached to the dustbins (cost efficient) distributed to all sources of municipal waste. This segregated waste will make it way to the community bins. This process will happen every day as it happens now. The Community Bins will be dedicated to each gated society, or a particular locality, and will be responsible for accumulating the municipal waste of that entire region. We will then collect this waste from there and bring it to our treatment unit. The municipal waste will be passed through our automation processes to segregate it for one last time. This will eliminate any human errors, thereby bringing up the process efficiencies. The organic waste will be first converted into compost. Then by understanding its market and consumers, some part of it will be kept out and the rest will be converted into to energy using bio methanation. Back calculation will be used to calculate the total demand of these compost. We will use anaerobic digestion plants to convert organic waste will go into biogas. Plastic, glass and paper will be sent to the respective industries and they will use them as the input product. Metal scrap can be used to make brand new materials, hence can be sent to its consumers in the raw form as well. Hazardous waste can be sent to chemical industries or e-waste depending on their type. This will help us to enable recycling through an ecosystem of partners, rather than by investing in our own machinery. Local industry and infrastructure will be promoted.

Solution

The entire waste to wealth management system will be built with the use of cutting-edge technical capabilities in integrated waste management and it will be grounded in strong technological capabilities. The entire operational flow will be as follows:

• Our customers will be primarily of four types, namely households, corporate houses, institutions (hospitals, schools, restaurants, etc.) and public services (parks, parking lots, bus stand, etc.)
• Each waste generating entity will be provided with three colored dustbins (If government is ready to bear the cost) or three colored stickers (If we will be providing them, they will be more cost efficient), as described below:
  • Green dustbin: Organic waste
  • Blue dustbin: Dry waste (Glass, Paper, Plastic and Metal)
  • Red dustbin: E-Waste and hazardous waste.
• This distribution of colored dustbins/colored stickers for 'waste segregation at source' will be conducted by the Municipal Corporation of Bhopal.
• The consumers will be educated to segregate the waste into these different dustbins before discarding them. As it is easiest to do it here at the ground root level.
• Every morning, a garbage picker will come to his door with three similarly colored bags
• The garbage picker will put the garbage of one dustbin into a bag of the same color. That means the blue dustbin waste goes into blue bag of garbage picker.
• There will be three differently colored community bins. Garbage picker empties his red bag into red community bin, blue bag into blue community bin, and so on.
• Generally, the places like gated communities, hospitals, schools, industries and so on generate enough amount of waste in a single day. Therefore, the community bins of such areas need to be emptied every day. Further saving people’s health from direct exposure of this waste for a long time. Using of IoT sensors, as Bhopal Municipal Corporation does now is a wastage of resources.
• Then, every morning at 10am, Swill Waste Management (our company) will go to collect the waste from all the communities. All these community bins will be located on a map and an optimized route will be planned for our garbage trucks to go and empty them.
• The garbage picking trucks will come back to our facility, where the segregated waste will be again sorted and segregated by automated sorting machines, just in case some unsegregated waste has made its way into our bins due to human negligence or human error.
• The organic waste will be converted into a compost. The consumers of this compost will be primarily two communities: Farmers and Biogas plants.
• Depending on back calculation techniques a certain amount of compost will be set aside according to the demand of the farming industry.
• The rest of the compost is sent to the Biogas plants. Here this compost is sent through the anaerobic digestive plants to convert it into biogas through bio methanation.
• For the dry waste further segregation will happen at the plant using automation. Here glass, metal, paper and plastic will be separated and supplied to the respective industries requiring them as the raw material.
• Paper will be recycled at our plant and will be supplied to small scale industries of rural Bhopal at a lower cost to help them boost their businesses.
• Recycled glass can be used for Fiberglass insulation products. Thus glass industry will be its ideal consumers.
• Metal waste today is sold to scrap buyers, which in turn is used to cast into new products. The same process will be followed by our company as well.
• Now-a-days single use plastic has been banned in India by the government and only recyclable plastic is used everywhere. This plastic can be recycled and used in a large number of products like making playground equipment. Making products with recycled plastics requires 66% less energy than using 'new' plastic materials.
• Similarly, the e-waste will be sent to its respective industry as well and the chemical waste will be sold to the chemical plants.
•  All other waste that cannot be recycled will go for incineration, which will help produce energy.

 

 Let’s have a look at various parts of the operations process, where there will be technological intervention:

1) User experience and Mobile app features:

• We will have a set number of communities from where the waste will be collected every day. But what about the newly introduced waste generating bodies that won’t be mapped on our route? That’s where we can introduce the user intervention. The user can upload a picture of the community bin along with the location and the waste will be collected that day or next day depending on when the collection truck is going to be dispatched.
• Truck drivers will be able to leverage the partner version of the app, for checking the optimized route of waste collection and to report the status of their activities
• Food donation app will allow restaurants to donate the leftover food, so that it can be passed by us to the orphanages or elderly care homes which partner with us – this will derive much higher value out of food instead of routing it to composting pits.

2) Route optimization:

• We will use the shortest distance first technique to optimize our routes daily thereby increasing our efficiency.

• For the newly introduced community bins on the map, If the frequency of this new waste generating body is more than the set threshold, then this community bin will be added in our daily map.
• The same process will be followed in reverse to delete any community bin from our route.
• GPS trackers will be placed on each of the trucks that go for the waste collection and then the raw material distribution.
• This will be done to track the SLAs on our end and will also provide the transparency on the users end.

 

3) Waste Segregation:

• Once the collected waste reaches at the plant, they will pass through one round of automated segregation process to eliminate any human error which was introduced at the ground or community level.
• This will be primarily separated into dry, wet and hazardous waste. The dry waste will be then further segregated into plastic, paper, glass and metal.
• Dry waste will be pass through magnetic belts, where all the metal will be collected and sent to the scrap industry.
• Then the remaining residue is sent through air blast rooms, which have blower fans. The fans are kept running at very high speed and hence the paper waste starts floating in the air and then can be easily separated.
• The last stage uses melting points of glass and plastic to separate them. The melting point of glass is 1700 C and that of plastic is 120 C – 170 C. The remaining waste goes into a sealed high temperature oven. It’s heated till all the hydrocarbon gases and liquids are boiled off and fractionally condensed into salable hydrocarbons. These hydrocarbons are sent to plastic industry and the glass collected is also sent to glass industry.

 

4) Corporate Social Responsibility:

• We shall partner with few restaurants on pilot basis and give them an app which helps them to donate their leftover food at the end of day.
• using the app, the restaurant owner can notify how much kilos of leftover food is available and what time the pickup is needed.
• Our personnel will reach the restaurant and pack the leftover food, which will be donated at shelter homes and orphanages that partner with us.
• This will retain the best value of food, rather than redirecting it into composting. 

 

5)Suggestion to the Municipal Corporation of Bhopal:

• We should bring in the sentiment of social responsibility in the individuals of the city. The citizens of the area need to be educated properly about the various reforms in place and how they can benefit them as well.
• Providing proper in to the citizens so that they are motivated to take part in this campaign. The incentives might not be always monetary. Example: When Indore wins the cleanest city in India title, the government makes an anthem every year and the citizens also recite it patriotically because they feel the sense of belongingness.
• Following adaptive approach. The waste to wealth management has already been implemented in other cities of the state like Indore. We can learn from their mistakes and also sought to improve our processes by taking few references too.

Conclusion

Bhopal currently has a well-defined waste collection and it has also educated its people to segregation of this waste appropriately. However, it lacks a sophisticated machinery to convert the waste into wealth of several types. This is where we will intervene and help government in producing meaning out of this waste. Our raw materials created from waste will go back to serving the state in the form of energy from waste, compost for farmers, recycled raw materials to small scale industries and we also plan to eliminate the hazardous waste from industries. All of these falls under the purview of the city administration. Moreover, by reducing the amount of waste going into landfills, we are in fact reducing land consumption, thereby freeing up land for the government and citizens of Bhopal, which is a huge wealth created indirectly. Based on emerging technologies and a robust governance framework, our strategy will usher in a sustainable future for Bhopal and will make it a role model for the entire nation.

Attached File Details

View Attachment file (NMO Semi Final Presentation..pptx)