RFID IN THE WASTE MANAGEMENT

With costs rising in the waste management process, RFID is enabling cities and municipalities to reliably identify individual receptacles and can create incentive-based recycling programs that accurately reward customers for the amount they recycle, while minimizing the overall amount of trash.

By automating the collection of all waste, RFID can assure that individual bins have been collected, providing verification of service. In addition this information can be used to optimize truck usage and routes. Processes can be streamlined and more accurate.

RFID technology helps a lot to increase efficiency of the waste management operations. To realize this application, a properly designed rugged RFID tag is attached to the waste bins. It contains all user/owner information.

An RFID reader/antenna embedded into the truck captures the tag IDs of each waste bin. The data collected from the RFID tags can be linked with a time stamp, type of container, weight of the container, and customer information. The data can be either sent to a host computer using wireless protocols or the data can also be stored in the truck on board computer and later transferred to a central waste management system for data processing.