Project title: Analyzing the impacts of ‘fly-tipping’ on climate in New Barnet

Team: Litter Ninjas

The Next Gen Ninja   Barnet   United Kingdom   2 Student’s age: 12-13 years old

What are the impacts of fly-tipping and how could we reduce it?

Fly-tipping is the illegal disposal of household, industrial, and commercial waste. Various research have highlighted that waste generated from fly-tipping is a predicament for governments, dangerous to public health and contributes to greenhouse gas emissions which eventually impacts the Earth climate to a significant level.
Our research idea analyses the problem in detail in the local area of New Barnet (UK), estimates its impacts on the climate derived through various scientific researches, and suggests the use of cutting-edge AI technology to tackle the issue. An AI-powered app could be developed and used by locals to detect the fly-tipped waste, record the location of the waste and report it to the respective local council. The local council could use this information to proactively plan for the waste clean-up and incentivise people to report the incidents which could further motivate them to report the incidents.

We identified three sites in New Barnet, and visited those to analyze the waste material at each site, estimated the weight of waste, and referred to scientific research to understand the amount of CO2 that could be released when specific waste materials are dumped in the ground, the water pollution impact and that other harmful gasses which would be emitted while these wastes go into the landfills when it is not treated appropriately.
The average weight of the waste from these three sites was estimated to be around 106.3 KG (319 KG in total from three sites), and it is expected to emit 491 KG (1473.05 KG in total from 3 sites) of CO2 on an average into the environment from each site.
Since, one fly-tipping site would on average emit 491 KG of CO2, total fly-tipping incidents in UK would emit 535.2 Mn KG of CO2 (1.09 Mn X 491 KG) per year, based on the assumption of 1.09 Mn incidents per year in UK in 2021/22 and we assume the incidents number remain same for 2022/23.
As per UK Gov website, the UK CO2 emissions is at around 500 Mn tonnes per year, so, fly-tipping contributes to 0.1% of the total CO2 emissions in the UK every year (535.2 Mn KG / 500 Mn tonnes)
Also, the CO2 emissions in the UK from waste is 6.2 Mn tonnes per year. So, fly-tipped waste contributes to 8.62% of the total CO2 emissions from waste in UK per year (535.2 Mn KG / 6.2 Mn tonnes)
We discovered that fly-tipping waste contributes to 8.62% of the total CO2 emissions from waste in the UK per year which is higher than the global average of 5.1%. hence, it is required that UK should focus on practicing appropriate measures to reduce this contribution and position it nearer to the global average.

The impacts of fly-tipping could be severe: from environmental damage to public health risks and financial burden on the governments. It’s important that we recognize the importance of the issue as impacts of fly-tipping is often undervalued in society. While governments are implementing “anti-fly-tipping” policies, imposing strict fines on people responsible for it, we prefer to use the power of cutting-edge technology to solve the issue.
One of the solutions we think could be to develop an AI-powered app which could be used by the public. Using the power of Machine-Learning, the app would allow users to capture an image of the waste using an inbuilt camera. The ML model would store, process and analyse the images to identify the type of waste material and object lying on the site. Once the object is identified, the user would report the fly-tipping incident (and the location) to the respective council. The council would use this information to ‘proactively’ plan for the management of waste. Furthermore, the user would be incentivised for the incidents he/she report to keep them motivated and would be educated on the devastating impacts from fly-tipping.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1XXb25UxU80cUrvPV6yMIkDUbx6txe6Ah?usp=share_link

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