Waste Company
Harnessing the Internet of Things to help recycle more and throw away less.
The company provides removal services for domestic and commercial customers and are charged for the volume of waste sent to landfill whilst earning revenue on commodities such as cardboard, plastic and metals that they can sell. As a result there is a strong financial pressure on them to recycle more waste and they were looking for new ways to achieve this.
Chris delivered a workshop to identify the current pain points and potential ways of overcoming them. The ideas were prioritised according to the value that they would bring versus the effort and cost of implementing them.
The first initiative was to start measuring the amount of waste being collected at a granular level and use the insights to drive communications policy and assure commercial contracts. Chris identified a suitable hardware partner to fix weighing sensors to the waste trucks’ lifting arm and a gateway device in the cabin to send the data to our cloud server. He also created a basic web dashboard with low code tooling to enable the company to see the heaviest bin lifts for their commercial customers and any overages versus their contractual limit.
After a sufficient period of time had elapsed to enable a large amount of data to be gathered, he also carried out geospatial analytics of the bin lift data across the city to identify patterns in high waste generation. This was then able to be used to target hotspots with recycling advice and understand better the routes that were taken by the waste trucks and potential optimisations to the route plans.
Chris also led a series of design thinking workshops to produce designs for a mobile app that would nudge residents towards recycling more using gamification and positive incentivisation techniques.
