The Smart Cheap City: efficient waste management on a budget

Smart cities are a natural evolution of the recent wave of technology, allowing both to offer better services to citizens and also to save costs. Nevertheless the adoption of smart city solutions have to face major problems, not due to technology but to society: economy and inertia. Even if the adoption of smart city technologies can bring to savings, new solutions need to face the general inertia of public administrations, that would have to face new expenses, without being familiar with these new kinds of options, therefore opting out of the perceived risk. For this reason we feel it is helpful to also consider a variant of smart city technologies, dubbed “Smart Cheap City” (SCC for short). A Smart Cheap City solution does not necessarily aim to maximize benefits to citizen, or to produce the biggest savings, but instead has a primary focus: minimizing the cost of implementation. This leads to lower the entry barrier, facilitating early adoption by cities, and so acting as a gentle introduction to the benefits of smart cities, fostering their wider and more effective adoption. We report on a project based on the SCC paradigm, tackling the waste management of a city, and show how smart cheap city solutions can be effectively used to provide both immediate benefit, and to overcome the barriers that have so far slowed down their adoption.