Food Waste Management System

 Abstract

The management of food waste has been one of the major environmental issues in the world today. This is especially true in Singapore where we have close to 5 million people living on an island with limited space to build more incineration plants. If the increasing amount of food waste can be collected and recycled, there will be less waste to be disposed of. Better still, if we could convert the food waste into reusable products such as fertilizers, not only will landfills be a thing of the past, there will be a boost in the reduction of greenhouse gases.

This environmentally friendly project, which looks into the collection of food waste from hawker centers demonstrates the use of an advance control system and a well designed process to effectively transport food waste to a central processing unit. The food waste is then desiccated to produce solid waste which can be recycled in the later stage.

 Introduction

 

    The process of generating energy from food waste is certainly an interesting concept when looking at food outlets (e.g hawker centers, food courts and restaurants). Not only does it allow these outlets to play an important role in the conservation of energy, these systems when properly utilized will have the potential to reduce their expenditure on energy usage. This is true as the excess energy generated can be channeled back into the system for cooking, lighting or other purposes.

 

This project will facilitate the development of a platform which allows the consolidation of food waste and finally the extraction of useful components which may be used to generate excess energy.

 

Project Objectives

 

·     To build a food recycling infrastructure at a hawker centre and analyze how this project can assist town councils in achieving an improved food waste management system.

 

·      To explore PAC-based design and development methodology, software as well as the implementation of distributed I/O network in a hawker centre.