6element
Our waste is valuable
A french version of this article is also available.
Waste management is one of most problematic issues that modern societies currently struggle with. Consumerism has led to massive consumption (or maybe the other way round, typical chicken-egg situation), and our occidental minds are now set to “useless things go to trash”.
This is wrong for 2 reasons:
- Useless things don’t necessarily go to trash. What’s useless to you might be useful to someone else. That’s the whole purpose of recycling.
- Waste is piling dangerously, up to the point where we bury a lot of it. With all the environmental consequences that we know.
Recycling truly is a good idea. Since people are not about to stop consuming, why not make stuff out of what we consume, to be consumed again later under one form or another ? The recycling logos are a perfect representation of this idea.
Problem is, we are lazy.
People are lazy
And recycling sometimes requires some efforts, which, depending on our current mindsets, might be too much to ask. Or at least much more than just throwing our waste at the regular bin. We all have everyday’s life stories about us or people we know in those kind of situations:
I don’t know what to do with this, I’ll just put it to regular bin.
The public glass bin was full, I just put it to regular bin.
There was too many people waiting at the recycling center, I have an important meeting with Grand Ma, so I’ll just put it on the side of the road.
Yes, people are lazy.
But at Ants, we don’t want to be giving people lessons. At Ants, we are somewhat lazy too. What we want is to give people better tools, better alternatives. Maybe people are lazy when it comes to recycling because they lack information, or maybe because the infrastructure is not properly designed. Probably a little bit of both.
At Ants, we work on finding solutions that could benefit most. We are really interested in helping public infrastructures to grow better, more adapted to the users. So we started working on this waste problem with the local actors of the waste management, at our level, around Bordeaux, France.
Give people useful information
Supported by the Aquitaine Region, we’ve been working on a solution to help the recycling centers of our region.
The main two issues we identified were:
- Rush hours. You don’t want to be waiting for hours to throw away a bunch of wood. So sometimes you just leave it on the side of the road. It’s just wood after all. Plus, you have an important meeting with Grand Ma.
- Full bins. There you are at the recycling center with your wood, but the wood bin is full… Maybe come back tomorrow ? No, tomorrow, you have an important meeting with Grand Ma. So you just throw it into the regular bin, the one that’s buried.
These issued share the same cause: the lack of information.
Then the idea is simply to give people useful information, so they never face one of these situations again. And why not go even further: in a lot of cases, people don’t really need to go to the recycling center at all. There might be a better alternative nearby that they don’t know about. Then we should also be listing the alternatives, so that one can have all the information necessary to actually get rid of its wastes in the most efficient manner possible.
Internet of Wastes
To address these issues, we, hackers and makers born in the era of Internet, thought of the most efficient way to communicate that we knew of. Internet.
Sure, information about waste can be found over Internet. But it’s generally decentralized, unclear, and not useful when needed. Our vision is to build a service that would offer the user complete and efficient information about what to do with their waste.
This service needs to be designed as a scalable and durable solution.
Real-time affluence
We designed a sensor capable of estimating the number of people present around its area. It is based on the Wi-Fi packets emitted by smartphones.
We will be using this data to inform people on current and future affluence, through a predictive model.
Our sensor design is adapted:
- we receive information about the current affluence in each recycling center every 5 minutes during opening hours,
- we have an efficient communication protocol which allows us to monitor, manage and update our sensors from a distance,
- we respect privacy, no personal information is used, we just count the number of smartphones,
- our sensors are cheap and easily planted.
We will write more about how we designed our sensors in a future post.
Make sure it’s available
To give direct access to the status of each bin, we’ve thought of 2 channels: the recycling center manager and crowdsourcing.
We’re designing a small touch screen for our sensor, which will allow the RC manager to toggle on and off the status of the bins. This information will directly sent to the users along with the measured affluence, using the same protocol.
Also, we want to give the user some power of action. When the bin you want to access is completely flooded, you should be able to instantly complain about it. Well, actually people do that already. But it’s not shared. Our idea is simple: offer the possibility to tag unavailable bins, which will benefit other users and inform the managing structure (we think about downtown glass containers or similar here) that some bins need to be taken care of.
Find alternatives
There are many alternatives to throwing away useless stuff, but they’re generally off the grid. We are currently listing every local alternative we can find, in order to build a structured open database we will make available to all.
But we also think of directly connecting people with the reusers, whether it’s an structured association, artists, or simply other citizens. What you throw off, maybe somebody else needs it.
This is the subject of whole part of the project that we call 2life: find the alternative that suits you most. We will write more about it later.
There you have it, the ambition of 6element: help people make their waste valuable. This is an ongoing open source project on which we currently spend all our time. It is written with a collection web technologies, and we work on making it as reusable as possible. For interested people, you can find resources on our Github page, should you wish to contribute.
For the record, the name of the project was inspired by “The 5th element” movie, by Luc Besson. After, water, wind, fire, earth and [spoiler alert] love, waste might be the 6th element.
Remember, our waste is valuable.
P.S: if you want to be informed of the progress of the 6element project, you can subscribe to the dedicated newsletter. No spam, just the necessary informations to keep you posted.
