Real world use case: Smart waste management (TWO)

One of the great things about IOTA is that it was designed for a specific purpose (IoT), but can be applied universally with all its advantages (scalable, fast and free-of-charge). A startup called TWO has now revealed how they want to make use of the Tangle for their project, TWO – IoT Waste Management.

The Idea

TWO is aimed at making an airport’s or a city’s waste management more efficient. At the moment, there are certain waste disposal services which regularly monitor and remove waste from trashcans. TWO wants to equip waste bins and containers with sensors which not only provide a real-time overview about the waste levels inside, but also “order” the truck fleet once they are full. In theory, this saves a lot of money and enables any waste management service to provide a complete ledger of their contract, from clearing the bin until the drop-off at the landfill facility.

How it Works

Every waste bin will be equipped with a sensor which everyone is probably familiar with: a vehicle reverse sensor (the thing which normally warns you before you bump against a wall with your car). This sensor has a WIFI transceiver aboard as well as a Lithium ion battery boasting 3 years of longevity. On top of that, a newly developed PCB allows the components to work together.

Since their first client will be an airport, let us have a look at how this will work:

The airport has a smart contract with a waste management company. This contract organizes the payments for each truck that takes away the garbage. The airport has a tangle-based monitoring and analytics platform which acts as soon as a trash can or container is full. The truck gets a signal, picks up the waste and brings it away.

This saves a lot of money as can be seen from the Dublin Airport example:

“Previously a staggering 1,200 bins were changed each day and that number is now reduced to just 93 changes per day as a direct result of the new bin technology.”

It could be that the airport chose a bad service for getting rid of the waste: the bad company collects empty bins and wants money for this “service”. However, since data stored on the Tangle is tamper-proof, you don’t need a lawyer to settle this issue. The smart contract would not approve this transaction because it would “see” that the bin was not empty. This prevents fraud and makes the service as cost-efficient as it can be. And the best part about utilizing the Tangle is that transactions of data and value are fee-less!

The startup is set to announce the first partnership (client is an airport) in Q3 2018. The full capabilities “will be deployed in its first city level scale to optimize waste management” in Q2 2019. The team surrounding Ontario Environmental Award Winner (2008) Hamoun Karami consists of 6 IT-experts.

A proof of concept is also underway:

Taipei city government (POC) to be integrated into the first three floors of the Taipei city hall building. TWO IOT will install IoT sensors that will measure the fill levels of their waste bins in real time. These IoT sensors will use the Tangle network to store the data collected by the sensors to a secure and tamperproof ledger. Biilabs inc. will provide the Tangle DLT engineering services and enable TWO IOT to use IOTA and show the world, that real world applications using IoT & Tangle are very much possible.

If you want to find out more about this, visit the IOTA ecosystem page of the project.

It will be interesting to see how this all evolves – but it already shows what IOTA is all about: disrupting our current ways of living and thinking for the better.

Read more:

www.twoiot.com

Whitepaper: http://twoiot.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Whitepaper.pdf