Every business has a front side whose major purpose is to attract customers. Eye-catching ads, bright shop windows, and cozy restaurant interiors form our first impression and determine whether we choose this or that company. Unfortunately, behind the facade, there's a not-so-attractive picture every company owner has to deal with daily.
Behind every healed patient of a healthcare company, there are used dressings, test tubes, and syringes. Every built house left tons of metal scraps, solvents, masonry and concrete. Even your favorite restaurant is involved in this vicious circle. Statistics show that food waste is as important a problem as plastic pollution. Such a state of affairs makes waste management a pretty important issue. Today, we’ll consider how modern technology can help to overcome this challenge and learn the basic principles of building a reliable waste management application.
What is Waste Management and Why You Must Not Underestimate It
As the name suggests, the major part of the process is to make sure that you get rid of the waste your company produces. However, everything’s not so simple and efficient waste management requires more than making sure that all your employees’ half-eaten sandwiches end up in the trash can at the end of the day. If you turn any kind of materials into something else before selling it to a customer, inevitably you’ll produce some waste. To deal with it effectively, you must apply management practices, starting from waste accumulation and ending with recycling.
Adopting new waste management strategies can become an integral part of your business and benefit you in many ways. The most obvious effect of such an approach is environmental. Due attention to recycling can be a good foundation to lowering the pollution of air, soil, and water. The economical factor should not be underestimated as well. For example, it provides new job opportunities. Waste management is a complex process that comprises a lot of moving parts. If you don’t want to let things go by themselves, it may be a reasonable decision to ensure that there’s an employee supervising the entire process. Here’s another example. Plastic recycling can help to reduce its toxicity and use it again to produce bottles, bags, and many other products. The global plastic waste management and recycling market size is forecast to reach $59.24 billion by 2030:
You must pay due attention to waste management since there are different types of waste you produce and each of them requires different approaches regarding storage, transportation, and processing. For example, the waste you deal with may be liquid or solid. Some of them are recyclable while others aren’t. Some waste is relatively harmless, for example, food leftovers. Nuclear and toxic materials, on the other hand, require compliance with storage and safety regulations.
As you can see, if you want to improve your waste management, you can rely on any application available in the market. Every software solution that you adopt must reflect the features of your business. The waste you produce is almost as unique as the product you create. Because of this reason, to achieve the best results in this task and improve your recycling, you can rely on a company providing custom web app development services to deliver you a waste management application.
How to Build an Efficient Application for Waste Management and Recycling
If you decide to adopt a waste management application, first you should decide which type of such a system will better suit your expectations. The thing is that nowadays developers can create applications so rich in features that you may not need the full range of functions they offer. Full-featured applications can cover all your needs from detecting types of waste you have to deal with to ensuring that your vehicles will deliver them to recycling facilities with no problems. If you’re not sure what feature set will guarantee the better outcome, you can always start with a Minimum Viable Product, see how the things go, and add more features as you require them.
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Now, let’s consider some waste management application features you may find useful. First, it’s important to know what types of waste you work with. This information will help you prepare proper storage and disposal conditions. Waste classification is a feature that not only will help you with recycling but also with predicting. When the application knows how much waste a specific product generates, it can inform you beforehand how much storage space you will need before you can proceed to recycling.
If you work with hazardous waste, you must take care of compliance monitoring. Following current local and state regulations will save your business from penalties and help to ensure the safety of your staff. For example, a mobile version of your waste management application can enable easy access to safety data sheets describing what chemical materials your employees will have to deal with and how they must handle them.
Waste disposal and recycling is costly by itself. You need storage space, containers designed for specific types of waste, and fuel to transport them. These and many other tiny things can turn up to quite significant recurring costs. To control this part of your budget, it will be reasonable to implement a cost estimation feature that will inform you how much you pay for waste management.
Probably, if some scrap metal gets lost in your warehouse, it won’t lead to a disaster. But if you deal with nuclear materials, any carelessness will cost you dearly. Your employees must have access to a reliable application that can find a specific container or a barrel in your warehouse in no time. Waste inventory tracking is not necessarily something costly. A system of QR codes that your warehouse employees can scan with their smartphones in most cases can do the trick. The data can be sent into a centralized database that any employee can access via any device.
If you don’t dispose of the waste yourself and deliver it to a third party company, some route optimization tools can become a good helper. Your application can find the optimal route from point A to point B and help drivers to avoid traffic jams. GPS trackers can collect real-time data on the current state of each vehicle, which analysis will help you cut costs on transportation. For example, with this data you can detect lengthy engine idling which elimination can cut fuel costs.
If waste transportation and recycling require special conditions, such as specific temperature or humidity, the use of IoT devices will be also quite helpful. Such a device installed in a vehicle can collect data on dozens of indicators and send them to your app in a real-time mode. If any indicator exceeds the permissible norm, the application will automatically notify all involved parties, which will help minimize the risk of potential accidents.
Conclusions
Waste management is a medal that has two sides. For some, recycling is an inevitable burden requiring additional costs. For others, it opens up new opportunities and allows them to receive a stable income. What everybody has in common is that efficient waste management is a must. Whether you do your best to not pollute the environment or are guided by more pragmatic goals, strict accounting of each piece of used plastic or scrap metal at least won’t be superfluous.