Intelligent Waste Separator

Mixed wet, dry and metal waste is hard to recycle, manual sorting is slow and unhygienic, and bins often overflow because their fill level is not monitored. This paper proposes the Intelligent Waste Separator, a low-cost IoT-based system that automatically separates waste into wet, dry and metal bins and monitors the fill level of each bin. A moisture sensor and a metal sensor read the waste, and an ESP32 microcontroller applies threshold logic and drives a servo or DC geared motor that drops the waste into the correct bin. Ultrasonic sensors track the fill level of each bin, and the ESP32 sends the waste category, fill level, status and time through Wi-Fi and an API to a database. A web dashboard built with HTML, CSS and JavaScript shows the bin status so that bins can be emptied on time. The system is organized into five modules: waste detection and separation, ESP32 programming and monitoring, IoT communication, database management, and testing and validation. This paper presents the architecture, methodology and planned evaluation of the system; the system is at the design stage, and no experimental results are claimed.