Case Study: Smart City Waste Management

Smart Waste Management Solution for Dubai

Dubai has emerged as the epicenter of modern innovation in the Middle East region. It has largely been responsible for changing the mindset in the Middle East when it comes to adopting new technologies.

Veolia Middle East, our client, has been rapidly growing its business in the Middle East region especially in the waste management and recycling domain. Veolia had recently undertaken a UAE wide initiative to collect recyclable waste from tenants.

Veolia Middle East wanted to implement a cloud-based application for smart waste management in a commercial building. Hundreds of tenants in a multi-storey commercial building would drop-off waste bags into a garbage chute system built into the building. Recyclable waste bags carrying a RFID tag would be sorted from general waste bags at the basement of the building by a RFID reader within the sorting chute system. The electronics and control system of the sorting chute system had to be maintained automatically connecting them to multiple stakeholders in the service chain. Tenants using a mobile App had to be incentivized for disposing more recyclable waste with gamification.

Sensfix customized its flagship sens-Facility suite into “sens-waste management platform” on the cloud and successfully demonstrated the capabilities Veolia Middle East was looking for. The Proof of Concept was carried out in a building with one installation of the garbage chute system.

Sensfix platform seamlessly integrated its stakeholder-specific mobile and web-Apps for Garbage Chute System, embedded electronics systems supporting the chute system, RFID/ QR-code based hybrid electronics reader and other sensors in the garbage chute system that send data over MQTT protocol to the cloud. Sensfix algorithms used the data to trigger service actions and scheduled authorized service personnel automatically.

Tenant complaints about the functioning of garbage chute systems across all buildings were captured on Mobile Apps used by them. A separate dashboard as well as UI designed for Arabic language was deployed. Tenants’ requests for bags and RFID tags in the building were aggregated and shown to the facility manager.

Tenant activity was monitored by tracking tenants’ mobile app usage and monthly statistics for — weight of recyclable waste disposed, total no of bags used, App usage and the frequency of waste disposal.

Illustration: A top-level click-through demonstration of sens-waste platform