iTrash: Incentivized Token Rewards for Automated Sorting and Handling

TL;DR

This paper introduces iTrash, an incentivized smart trashcan that improves recycling efficiency in small offices by over 30%, while also collecting valuable user behavior data and exploring blockchain-based economic incentives.

Contribution

The paper presents iTrash, a novel intelligent trashcan with incentivization and data collection features, and demonstrates its effectiveness through a real-world experiment and blockchain integration.

Findings

iTrash increases recycling efficiency by over 30%

iTrash collects valuable user and usage data

Blockchain incentives can promote recycling behaviors

Abstract

As robotic systems (RS) become more autonomous, they are becoming increasingly used in small spaces and offices to automate tasks such as cleaning, infrastructure maintenance, or resource management. In this paper, we propose iTrash, an intelligent trashcan that aims to improve recycling rates in small office spaces. For that, we ran a 5 day experiment and found that iTrash can produce an efficiency increase of more than 30% compared to traditional trashcans. The findings derived from this work, point to the fact that using iTrash not only increase recyclying rates, but also provides valuable data such as users behaviour or bin usage patterns, which cannot be taken from a normal trashcan. This information can be used to predict and optimize some tasks in these spaces. Finally, we explored the potential of using blockchain technology to create economic incentives for recycling, following a Save-as-you-Throw (SAYT) model.