Developing solutions for pay-as-you-throw information systems

Abstract

The development of pay-as-you-throw (PAYT) systems – one of the strategies behind smart waste concepts – has a large set of challenges from the information technology (IT) point of view. The diversity of existing charging models in different towns already poses a complexity problem for a single universal IT solution. The situation is even more complex as the diversity of pay-as-you-throw systems is very large, with different tariffs and different objectives. This paper describes the development of an information system for supporting multiple approaches for PAYT systems and describes its implementation in the context of a European project. The design strategy and the use of best practices lead to a scalable and effective PAYTspecific Information System that has proved itself able to support a diversity of requirements across south Europe. Vrilissia. Several waste producers were addressed in this project: big producers (namely industry producing more than 1100 L/d), small businesses (e.g. restaurants), and residential blocks. Different towns were addressing different waste producers, in order to assess the reaction of different populations, and extract knowledge that may facilitate wider adoption in further locations. Given the differences among the target municipalities and waste producers, the technical solution adopted at the five locations were necessarily different. Regardless of these differences, all PAYT systems have the same main three components (Fig. 1): (1) the sensor and devices sub-system (identifying the user or the container); (2) a data network; (3) and the information system (collecting, storing, processing, and making available all information). Figure 1. Technology flow for PAYT systems. The tag & sensoring (module 1) and the transport network (module 2) have been previously addressed (Madureira & Dias-Ferreira 2019a, b). The current work describes the development of module 3, the information system, to be used within the LIFE PAYT project. In this particular case the Information System (IS), named PAYT-IS, is where data from all project sites is collected, processed and made available. 2 THE DESIGN OF PAYT-IS