Cities around the world are facing great challenges due to increasing urbanization, and one of the major challenges is the rising amount of generated waste and littering due to high demand for food products and other essentials. Public waste bins are filling up faster than ever and inevitably many of the bins end up overflowing before collected, causing not only cluttered streets and bad odors but also negative health and environmental impacts.
While in most developed countries the waste collection processes are efficient enough to prevent major disasters from happening, in some cities the careless attitudes of local bodies towards maintaining cleanliness have caused deadly results. One of the cities with major waste problems has been Naples, where the mafia is accused of dumping toxic waste around the city and thereby causing high rates of cancer, allergies and birth defects. Another good example of a city suffering from unhygienic conditions was Surat in India, where a pneumonic plague epidemic broke out in 1994, causing 52 deaths.
Although not as deadly risky as dumping tons of toxic waste around the city borders, overflowing waste containers are still a great nuisance and a risk to our health and environment. In this article, we present five outcomes of overflowing garbage bins and suggest how modern technology could ease the problems by increasing the efficiency of waste collections and informing the waste handlers before the bins overflow.
One of the outcomes of overflowing garbage is air pollution, which causes various respiratory diseases and other adverse health effects as contaminants are absorbed from lungs into other parts of the body. The toxic substances in air contaminated by waste include carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane. In everyday life we identify the polluted air especially through bad odors, which are usually caused by decomposing and liquid waste items.