Congress MP Priya Dutt, who launched the Ghanta Gaadi scheme for garbage collection on Tuesday, at a slum in Mumbai. (Fotocorp)

New Delhi, Dec. 28: The sight of municipal waste spilling out of overflowing garbage bins might become a thing of the past with a little help from software developed by environmental engineers in Nagpur.

A team at the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (Neeri) in Nagpur has developed a software that uses metropolitan geographical information to position garbage bins and chalk out the best pick-up routes for garbage trucks.

“The goal is more rational and more efficient collection, transport and disposal of solid waste in a large city,” said Dr Apurba Gupta, the head of the environmental systems design and modelling division at Neeri.

The Solid Waste Management System Design software divides a city into smaller blocks and calculates the number, position, and type of garbage bins that each block would require.

It uses local geographic and demographic information such as population density, income group distribution, road networks and city topography to assign bins to different blocks and develop schedules for garbage collection by trucks.

The Neeri team developed the software on a geographical information system platform ? a computer-based system that combines maps as well as relevant spatial data for efficient resource management.

The software will compute the ideal frequency of removal of garbage from each bin by municipal trucks for efficient use of a limited number of vehicles.

“It is based on rules that connect garbage generation with local features such as density of population and activities in the area,” said Gupta.

The type of solid waste generated within a city changes with location. Residential localities, for instance, would typically generate a greater proportion of solid organic waste, while commercial zones would produce waste with high proportion of plastic or paper.

“Solid waste generated by commercial centres will be primarily paper and plastic, while waste near a vegetable market would be organic waste,” said Gupta.

The software calculates the number of bins and the frequency of collection by garbage trucks.

Gupta and his colleagues have described their research work in the journal Waste Management Research. In a test in which the Neeri team applied the software on a computer-simulated city block, the software assigned 45 bins at different locations in the area, specifying the frequency of waste removal from each bin. It assigned a removal frequency of alternate days to 24 bins and daily emptying for 22 bins.

Precise bin size estimation will minimise the possibility of overflowing bins or under-use of the storage facility, introducing improved hygiene and environmental conditions, the scientists said in their paper.