All over the world, large cities are running out of space for municipal solid waste. Existing landfill sites are rapidly filling up and no-one wants a new site anywhere near their homes or businesses. Meanwhile, taxpayers aren’t interested in higher costs for quality waste management either.
One way of significantly extending the working life of existing waste management sites is recycling. Recyling can also reduce unemployment, help to establish a circular economy or move towards zero waste. But often, households are highly resistant to recycling, or recycling more.
A recent study shows how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can give city waste managers a more powerful way of forecasting landfill requirements for a city in the long term. The researchers used machine learning to forecast municipal solid waste in a large African city. The forecast shows how much waste there will be in 30 years’ time, if levels of recycling stay the same. Dr Olusola Olaitan Ayeleru and Mr Lanrewaju Ibrahim Fajimi published their research in the Journal of Cleaner Production. Both are at the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Johannesburg.
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Source: EurekAlert!
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