Digitizing Waste Collection through Handling, Tracking, and Recycling to Disposal

In this challenge, we are looking for digital solutions to better manage the waste management, reverse supply chain, increase recycling, increase collection, reduce open dumping, reduce materials to landfills, and track waste through the many hands it passes through. Waste traceability is more important and relevant nowadays in creating more resilient communities.

Waste is the government’s problem—This simple statement is at the heart of Asia’s waste crisis. Governments have limited budgets to support transformation in the waste industry, let alone deriving benefits from waste. Interventions via urban infrastructure and waste-to-energy plants are often over-designed as magic bullet solutions. Private and informal sectors are excluded from planning scenarios and often considered a hindrance to achieving sanitation.

To transform the waste industry and gain value from waste, governments need new tools to create a functional market for all wastes within the supply chain. The circular economy needs a “Central Nervous System” to create and regulate a functioning market for material recovery, value creation, and energy extraction.

Realizing this requires linking the government systems to the operations on the ground. Work is underway on developing extended producer responsibility (EPR) schemes to tax goods as they enter the marketplace. What is required is an app or a system with local context to track waste as it is generated from production to disposal. The app would follow waste through the many hands and activities involved in the reverse supply chain and would therefore provide (i) a foundation for waste reduction, (ii) improved accountability, and (iii) better identification of activities that could be improved towards increased sustainability

Using digital technology, how can we inspire people to sort, recycle, upcycle, reuse, and innovate to reduce the waste sent to its final disposal? 

Let’s bring the waste management and recycling sector into the 21st century…really!