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Technology use cases in the area of environment: waste management, air pollution monitoring and smart lighting
Due to its specifications, NB-IoT can be used in the following areas of city management related to the environment: waste management, air pollution monitoring and smart lighting.
Referring to the efficient waste management, there are some of the examples of smart cities that are at the forefront of using the technology to improve waste management.
The first one is Singapore, that was ranked first in the Global Smart City Performance Index 2017 (Global Smart City Index 2017, 2018). The index graded cities on how well technology improved citizen life in four areas – mobility, health, safety and productivity. In 2016, Singapore began experimenting with smart, solar-powered rubbish bins that served as internet hotspots and came equipped with fill-level sensors. Each bin was also equipped with a compactor, which gave it eight times the capacity of a normal rubbish container. Singapore was the first smart city to implement the intelligent rubbish bin concept.
It is also worth mentioning the city of Barcelona. It was one of the earliest cities, which adopted the smart approach to urban development. Apart from other actions, Barcelona spent 1.5 billion Euros over four years to manage waste and recycling. Today, however, the city has committed itself to reducing these costs through home-based recycling and fill-level sensors in waste bins.
As the capital of Silicon Valley, San Francisco is located high on lists of smart cities rankings. This is due to the fact that city committed itself to a zero-waste goal by 2020, nowadays still working hard to achieve the goal.
Also, Seoul introduced smart waste solutions by installing Clean Cubes, a solar- powered waste compaction bin with embedded sensors. This solution has reduced Seoul’s waste collection costs by about 83% (
www.aclima.eus/en/how-seoul-used-the-iot-to-improve-waste-management-and-collec tion/).
Finally, Seattle’s smart city waste management strategies include recycling initiatives, a stable rate path, and a revamped transfer station. The city is updating its waste manage- ment plan in part to take advantage of the latest in IoT-based waste management technology.
Interest in air quality is building, both politically and in the media. Awareness of the issues relating to air quality is also growing and will continue to grow as more monitoring networks are installed and as more citizen science projects are instigated. This will increase pressure on governments and local authorities to implement measures that improve air quality, especially in towns and cities.
An interesting example is London, one of the smartest cities in the world. The city, within the frames of the initiatives called Smarter London Together (Smarter London Together, 2018), promotes user-oriented design, data sharing, connectivity, digital
leadership and skills, and collaboration between public services and the private sector. As one of the solutions in the field of monitoring air quality, the City is launching a group of sensors attached to lamp posts in the highly polluted areas. These actions are undertaken as part of the Connected London program. In the nearest future, two Google Street View cars will record smog occurrences in the most affected spots.
A monitoring underpins awareness, engagement, town planning and mitigation strat- egy. The emergence of reliable low-cost sensors is vitally important because it is the key technology needed for effective air quality monitoring.
Going further into NB-IoT use cases, a research report from Internet of Things analyst firm Berg Insight is predicting bright times for the smart street lighting industry with its installed based set grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24.5% from 2018 to reach 31.2 million by 2023 (Smart Cities: Connected Public Spaces Report, 2019). Lighting is responsible for a staggering 19% of global electricity usage. Powering streetlights account for 30–50% of a typical city’s energy bill. Each year, the European countries spend over €10 billion in order to power their streetlights (E-Street – 05/157 report, 2017). With smart street lights, cities can save energy, cut CO2 emissions, limit light pollution and lower operations and maintenance costs, all while keeping citizen feel safe and satisfied.
Public lighting is currently the core of many smart city initiatives around the world. By replacing traditional streetlights with LED-based lamps, utilities can cut energy and operations costs by 46% or more. Further savings can be achieved introducing an adequate dimming control during off-peak hours as well as by networking streetlights, also introducing the capability of sensing actual conditions (traffic, weather, luminance conditions) and dimming lights accordingly. Enabling such functionalities, thus turning the lighting infrastructure into a smart one, could lead to an overall saving of 80% or more. Beyond energy savings, since each smart streetlight needs to be provided with bidirectional communication capabilities, an ubiquitous city-wide communication net- work arises from the lighting infrastructure. Thinking more broadly, streetlights are no longer isolated elements, but could establish a capillary, multifunctional, city-wide com- munication network, capable of relaying information, gathering data and delivering services to and from millions of IoT devices. Streetlights could thus support city-wide IoT services, which will make them key enablers of the smart city revolution (Brdulak, 2020).
Given examples confirm that NB-IoT makes the Internet of Things suitable for large- scale use. High coverage at low-cost facilitates a host of compelling use scenarios. In the described examples of technology applications in cities in the area of the environment, sensors help to control the air pollution level (Duangsuwan et al., 2018), support waste management or reduce the waste of energy by steering the light intensity in city space. The other areas also benefit from Narrowband IoT. For instance, in logistics sector, given suitable network expansion, goods shipments can be tracked worldwide. And in the home, connected water metres or simple order buttons for consumables can be run with NB-IoT.
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