Waste2Worth: A Smart Mobile-Based Solution for Real-Life Waste Management, Recycling Awareness and Urban Sanitation
Main Article Content
Abstract
Waste management has become one of the most serious urban challenges in India today. Even though our cities are growing fast, the basic systems of waste collection, segregation, and disposal have not kept pace. People see garbage lying on the roads but do not know whom to report it to. They want to recycle old items but do not know how. They need to find nearby scrap dealers or public toilets, but there is no single platform available for all these things together. In this paper, we present Waste2Worth — a mobile application developed as part of Smart India Hackathon 2025 (Problem Statement SIH25060) for providing real-life solutions in waste management. The proposed system integrates five core functionalities: (1) photo-based waste reporting with GPS location tagging that sends alerts directly to municipal authorities, (2) a detailed step-by-step recycling guide for common household waste products, (3) a nearby scrap center locator that sorts available centers from shortest to longest distance within a 5 km radius, (4) a Sauchalay (public toilet) finder with live navigation support, and (5) a user profile management module. The application is built on a mobile-first architecture using React Native for the front-end, Node.js for backend services, and Google Maps API for location-based features. The paper describes the system design, module details, and the social impact expected from the deployment of this solution.
Article Details
Section
COPYRIGHT
Submission of a manuscript implies: that the work described has not been published before, that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere; that if and when the manuscript is accepted for publication, the authors agree to automatic transfer of the copyright to the publisher.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work
- The journal allows the author(s) to retain publishing rights without restrictions.
- The journal allows the author(s) to hold the copyright without restrictions.
References
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to sincerely thank the Smart India Hackathon 2025 organizing committee for providing this opportunity to work on real-world problems. Special gratitude is due to our institution's faculty guides and mentors for their continuous support and constructive feedback during the development of this project. We also acknowledge the valuable inputs received from municipal sanitation workers and kabadiwalla community members during our field research, without whose on-ground perspective this solution would not have been grounded in reality.
REFERENCES
[1] T. Anagnostopoulos, A. Zaslavsky, A. Medvedev, and S. Khoruzhnikov, "Robust waste collection exploiting cost efficiency of IoT potentiality in smart cities," in Proc. Int. Conf. Recent Advances in Internet of Things (RIoT), Singapore, 2015, pp. 1–6.
[2] K. Pardini, J. J. P. C. Rodrigues, S. A. Kozlov, N. Kumar, and V. Furtado, "IoT-based solid waste management solutions: a survey," J. Sens. Actuator Netw., vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 1–21, 2019.
[3] S. S. Navghane, M. S. Killedar, and Dr. V. M. Rohokale, "IoT based smart garbage and waste collection bin," Int. J. Advanced Res. Electron. Commun. Engg. (IJARECE), vol. 5, no. 5, pp. 1576–1578, May 2016.
[4] R. Kumar and A. Singh, "Mobile applications for improving public sanitation behavior in rural India: a behavioral study," J. Community Health, vol. 44, pp. 610–618, 2019.
[5] Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, Government of India, "Swachh Bharat Mission (Urban) — Guidelines and Progress Report 2024," New Delhi, India, 2024.
[6] Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), "Annual Report on Municipal Solid Waste Management in India," New Delhi, India, 2023.
[7] Smart India Hackathon 2025, Problem Statement SIH25060: "Real life solutions for Waste Management," Ministry of Education, Government of India, 2025.
[8] N. Kasliwal and S. Bhatt, "A review on solid waste management practices and emerging technologies in Indian urban local bodies," Int. J. Environ. Sci. Technol., vol. 17, pp. 3543–3558, 2020.
[9] Patel, Mayank. Data Structure and Algorithm With C. Educreation Publishing, 2018
[10] A. Tchobanoglous, H. Theisen, and S. Vigil, Integrated Solid Waste Management: Engineering Principles and Management Issues. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993.