Design and development of an automatic dry waste segregator for household and institutional wastes

Paper in proceeding, 2022

The rise in urban waste generation in India comes from the consumerist behaviour and the ever-increasing population density in the cities. A vast majority of this collected waste is dumped into landfills. The rural situation is somewhat akin except for the amount of waste generated is less and the traditionally informal method for waste recovery and reuse have been implemented for a long time. So, to scale down the perplexity and minimize the human effort, an enticing idea of a cost-effective 'Automatic waste segregator' has been conceptualized for segregation of waste. The automatic waste segregator is designed to be installed in housing colonies and organisations like schools and facilitates efficient sorting of dry wastes into three separate categories namely: ferromagnetic metals, paper and plastic. A shredder is used to mince the lump to the required size while a magnetic drum is implemented for removing ferromagnetic metals from the pile. A plastic and paper separating unit is designed and developed based on the thermal principle. Various explicit dynamics investigations have been carried out by means of a finite element tool to analyse the total deformation of components and transient thermal analysis in order to understand the temperature variation. The prototype segregates household and institutional wastes with an average overall efficiency of 86.78% and 91.82% respectively.