Abstract
Nowadays with the increasing amount of waste generated and limited landfill space for waste
disposal, recycling is one of theimportant approaches to manage the waste effectively. The
current manual recycling practice in which the user need to bring thewaste in bulk to the recycling
center might be hassle and hence become a discouraging factor for them to recycle. To overcomesuch an issue, in
this project an automated recycle bin with a reward feature is proposed that derived from a reverse
vendingmachine (RVM) concept. Basically, the system is implemented in a standard recycle bin
provided by local municipal thatequipped with microcontroller and collection of sensors. Throughout the
process, the sensors responsible to identifying userinformation, weight the scale and eventually convert the weight
to the corresponding points automatically. Once the processcompleted, the user can claim their points by
using RFID point card. All the mentioned process will be controlled by amicrocontroller. The system
has been implemented in a small scale user testing and the framework shows its effectiveness forhandling the
whole process. The prototype is expected to aid in accelerating the motivation among Malaysian to recycle
theirwaste, and can be one of the frameworks to overcome urban poverty issue by using waste to wealth concept.
© 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier [Link]-review under responsibility of organizing committee of the
2016 IEEE International Symposium on Robotics and IntelligentSensors (IRIS 2016).
Keywords:
Reverse Vending Machine (RVM), Recycle Bin, RFID.* Corresponding [Link].: +607-453-
7518; fax: +607-453-6060.
E-mailaddress:
mdrazali@[Link]
© 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND
license([Link] ).Peer-review under responsibility of organizing
committee of the 2016 IEEE International Symposium on Robotics and IntelligentSensors(IRIS 2016).
76
Razali Tomari et al. / Procedia Computer Science 105 (2017) 75 – 80
1.
Introduction
Recycling is one of the important approaches taken for managing waste effectively. It is a
process of collecting and processing unwanted materials
to be turned into new products. Recently in Malaysia, the government will requirethe separation
of waste at home starting from 1 September 2015. Implementation of the separation of waste at
homewould involve state that adopting Act 672, which it will be Wilayah Persekutuan Kuala
Lumpur, Putrajaya, Pahang,Johor, Melaka, Negeri Sembilan, Perlis and Kedah. The recycling
campaign was started in 1993 and this campaignhas not met the objectives due to less
commitment from the community and less serious of awareness about the program that has
been done. At present, the recycling rate in Malaysia is only 10% compared to other
countries [1].The current practice is to separate and collect the recycle waste at home in bulk,
then the consumers have to bringthe waste manually to the recycling centre. This hassle steps
could be one of the discouraging factors to Malaysiancitizens to recycle. Nevertheless, it is
proven that the awareness among citizens on waste recycling is not very goodwhen they also
misused the provided facilities. Considering this problem, it shows that Malaysians are far
fromcontributing to effective solid waste management system in Malaysia. Due to the lack of
land for landfill and also air pollution as a result of incineration, waste recycling is a very
critical issue to be highlighted in waste [Link] of Housing and Local Government
aims to achieve a recycling rate of 22% by the year [Link], many countries such as China
[2], India [3], including Malaysia [4] are moving towards systematictechniques in managing
waste. With the growth of the information technology, the trend is clear that the use
oftechnology in managing waste has getting an attention nowadays. The utilization of techniques
such as RFID [5] hassuccessfully indicate that technology are capable in providing a facility for
the authority to manage wasteeffectively, it also can be a contributing factor that lead the people
to recycle and manage the waste. In addition,experience worldwide has proven that rewarding is
the most effective way to preserve high participation level inrecycling process [6]. To ensure that
the desired goals can be achieved, one of the plausible methods is byimplementing a Reverse
Vending Machine (RVM) concept in which the user will get their reward when they recycletheir
item [Link] is an innovative concept which has been introduces to help collect
recycling materialseffectively and hence boost up recycling activities and consequently improve
the waste management. The RVMmachine is usually utilise to encourage community to properly
dispose of their waste, particularly recycle materialssuch as plastic, paper and aluminium. There
are many works done to construct RVM to suit the need of localcommunity and some of them
can be found in [7]. Basically the RVM development research can be divided into power
supply generation [8], types of microcontroller [9] and sensing mechanism [10]. A
comprehensive overviewof RVM features and its implementation throughout the world can be
found in [11] while a method and apparatusfor detecting fraud attempts in RVM is
compressively discussed in [12].Our system is differ from previous RVM in a way that we
implement the develop system into a standard recycle bin and maintaining the
conventional procedure for the user to dump the waste. This product evaluates the value ofthe
dump waste according to its weight, type and price of the recycle waste. This will benefit the
users as well as theauthorities that involved in waste management as all the transactions will be
recorded in archive of this automated
system. Apparently, this product will emerge “waste to wealth” concept by motivating and
encouraging Malaysians
to recycle as they will be rewarded and eventually increase their awareness on the importance of
waste recycling.