Engineering Laboratories Chemical Waste Management—Introduction of a Web-Based System

As part of the global action toward the environmental challenges our world has been facing recently, an urgent call for promoting environmental sustainability has emerged to tackle the deterioration of the quality of the environment. The improper management of chemical wastes generated by laboratories of higher education institutions has become a great concern, with minimal universities taking the initiative to tackle the issue. In this study, a chemical waste management system consisting of four interrelated functions has been developed in order to properly manage the chemical wastes generated at the engineering laboratories of the University of Balamand. The use of ChemSorter can help the university in developing real-time chemical inventories with minimal cost using a user-friendly experimental setup. The study employed standard software engineering methodology, starting with identifying system requirements and designing the system accordingly. The ChemSorter prototype consisted of four modules: experiment, inventory, library, and reporting, which were designed and tested during implementation. The development of this on-campus chemical waste database application helps reduce data entry time and improves decision support for waste storage and disposal.