Meram Municipality won the "Smart Waste Collection System with IoT" award at the 11th Public IT Summit organized by the Public Informatics Association.
Meram won the award with a system that directs vehicles only to the full underground containers, saving fuel, energy, and time through sensors attached to the containers.
At the summit held under the theme "Informatics for the Future" and hosted by the Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK), the award for Meram Municipality was presented to Turgay Turhan, the Information Processing Manager of Meram Municipality.
In the panel titled "Informatics in Local Governments," where "Smart City Projects" were discussed, Turgay Turhan, the Information Processing Manager of Meram Municipality, shared the success story of the Meram Municipality project. The project aims to equip underground containers with sensors to direct the vehicles of the Environmental Protection and Control Department only to the full ones.
Turhan, noting that the project received grant support from MEVKA, stated, "We provide services to 69 neighborhoods across an area of 1,949 km2 in our district. In these neighborhoods, we have solid waste collection points. According to the region's needs, galvanized containers or underground composite containers have been distributed throughout the district. By attaching sensors to 1,017 underground containers, we directed our vehicles only to the full ones. We made all the underground containers in the district trackable, and waste can now be collected through vehicle routing. This way, we have saved on fuel, energy, time, and labor. Additionally, thanks to the system, we can prevent fires caused by stove ash from affecting our containers."
