COmmunity-Based Organized Littering

Littering is a major problem that threatens the environment (e.g., causing fire hazards, air pollution, and street flooding), society (e.g., causing human health hazards), and the economy (e.g., causing significant expenses for administrations and municipalities). The root of littering is indeed in society and cannot be feasibly solved by the authorities alone: addressing littering requires everyones' commitment.

Managing littering is a multi-faceted problem that requires the cooperation of different professionals and agencies. The project focuses on illegal dumping and addresses the automated localization and identification of abandoned littering and managing its proper disposal in an integrated and flexible way. Previous approaches, including those based on citizens' engagement, were not practical enough to be successful because they required too much effort from the community or involved technical solutions that were not easily accessible by municipalities. The COBOL project will deliver key novel technical solutions that can promisingly change the level of practicality of participatory approaches for littering management. In particular, it will deliver lightweight littering reporting solutions that will enable devices to report littering transparently (e.g., automatically detecting and reporting the littering present in a selfie taken by someone) and let citizens report littering explicitly. It will deliver comprehensive engagement models involving all the stakeholders in the littering disposal process. It will collect and process data at the level of multiple communities exploiting federated learning techniques, delivering unprecedented littering prediction and detection capabilities that small rural communities can exploit that could not otherwise generate enough data to train effective models. It will deliver a model-driven self-adaptive solution that can be flexibly adapted to various contexts and deal with unexpected events to guide citizens and authorities in the waste disposal process effectively. Pilots with two municipalities will demonstrate the effectiveness of the COBOL solution.