Abstract
In recent years, the production of municipal solid waste has constantly been increasing. Recycling is becoming more and more important, as it is the only way that we can have a clean and sustainable environment. Recycling, however, is a process that is not fully automated; large volumes of waste materials need to be processed manually. New and novel techniques have to be implemented in order to manage the increased volume of waste materials at recycling factories. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology that can identify common waste materials as they are being processed on a moving belt in waste collection facilities. An efficient waste material detection and classification system is proposed, which can be used in real integrated solid waste management systems. This system is based on a convolutional neural network and is trained using a custom dataset of images, taken on site from actual moving belts in waste collection facilities. The experimental results indicate that the proposed system can outperform existing algorithms found in the literature in real-world conditions, with 92.43% accuracy.
Highlights
Due to the constant increase in the population and lack of possibility of developing available natural resources, the problem of raw materials wastage has started to become a significant issue affecting mankind
We propose an automatic system based on convolutional neural network (CNN) that is capable of separating the waste materials based on their category
Training the neural network and using the proposed system requires a significant amount of computational power
Summary
Due to the constant increase in the population and lack of possibility of developing available natural resources, the problem of raw materials wastage has started to become a significant issue affecting mankind. The air, soil, and water have become contaminated, and flora and wildlife have become endangered and extinct. This is especially noticeable in developing countries, where recycling rates are significantly lower. The quantity of poisons and chemicals in the air in some developing countries is many times higher than what is considered tolerable. It is just a matter of time until people start developing respiratory and neurological disorders as a result of living in an atmosphere with such high levels of pollutants in the air
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