Evreka! There’s a Solution for Smart Waste Collection Management in Smart Cities
Planet Earth is currently suffering from overpopulation. According to the United Nations, over 83 million people are added to the world’s population each year. This results in increasing pressure on the planet’s limited natural resources and negatively affects the environment.
The tendency shows that this will increase in the next few years. By 2025, the world population will be over 8 billion people. Around 2050 it could hit 9.8 billion, and by 2100 it could reach a massive 11.2 billion people.
Logically, an increase in population means an increase in waste. According to the United Nations, there is 2.12 milliontons of waste every year.
“Every year humans dump a massive 2.12 billion tons of waste. If all this waste were put on trucks they would go around the world 24 times.” -WorldCounts.com
According to the World Bank Group, an organization that promotes prosperity in a sustainable way, current global Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) (PDF) generation levels areapproximately 1.3 billiontonnes per year. Municipal Solid Waste is commonly known as trash or garbage. The global waste generation levels are expected to increase to approximately 2.2 billion tonnes per year by 2025.
This represents a significant increase in per capita waste generation rates, from 1.2 to 1.42 kg per person per day in the next fifteen years with rates varying by region, country, cities, and even within the same city.
Driven by rapid urbanization and growing populations,global annual wastegeneration isexpectedto jump to 3.4 billion tonnes over the next few decades, according to the World Bank Group.
“If Earth’s history is compared to a calendar year, modern human life has existed for 23 minutes, and we have used one-third of Earth’s natural resources in the last 0.2 seconds.” -WorldCounts.com
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Americans alone generated about 254 million tons of trash in 2013, and recycled and composted about 87 million tons of this material, equivalent to a 34.3 percent recycling rate. On average, humans have recycled and composted 1.51 pounds of the total individual waste generation of 4.40 pounds per person per day.
The graph below shows the total MSW recycling rate in a study from 1960 to 2013 in the United States alone and the increasing tendency that continues rising.
The United States tops the list of the ten countries that produce the most waste followed by Russia, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, Mexico, France, Italy, Spain, and Turkey.
Although China is not on the list, China will produce approximately 533 million tons of waste by 2030, according to the World Bank Group.
One of the main reasons is the increase of waste in consumption of packaged foods. The packaged-food market uses an incredibly unnecessary amount of packaging, which mainly contains plastic, one of the main ocean pollutants.
At this rate, we are going to live in waste. Actions to prevent excess waste in the future must be coupled with immediate action plans. Otherwise, the world’s environmental problems are going to escalate dramatically in a shorter period of time.
Sweden is a global champion of recycling.
