STERLING: A framework for serious games to encourage recycling

Abstract

Waste disposal and recycling is becoming one of the main problems in Western countries. Improving both recycling culture among citizenship and waste collection and treatment logistics is critical to augment the percentage of waste being recycled. In this paper we present STERLING, an initiative that aims to help in both fields. STERLING is a framework composed by a low-cost, low-energy sensor installed in recycling containers to measure fi ll level and other physical parameters. The sensor is activated magnetically each time the container lid is opened by a user. Instead of directly sending this information to a cloud-based server, our sensor broadcasts a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) packet to the surrounding area. An App running in the mobile phone of the user performs two actions: To capture this information, re-sending it to the cloud-based server, and to assign credit to this particular user for having used the recycling container. In this way, users are rewarded for using the container, and the infrastructure bene ts from cost-free communications from the container to the server. In this paper we will describe our idea in detail, showing how it can be used to develop a rewarding schema that encourages recycling.