San Francisco spans a mere 47 miles, but it’s dense; it’s hilly; and flanked with narrow, heavily traveled streets. It’s a trying landscape for the city’s street cleaners and waste and recycling haulers—especially given the diversity among communities that they serve.
There is no one-size approach to managing the mountains of trash and recyclables in this dynamic town.
Public Works and the Environment Department have turned to technology for help in finetuning their approach and to ultimately be able to work quicker and more efficiently.
Public Works fields about 10,000 calls a month related mainly to overflowing trash bins on city streets. The requests come in through a 311 system and are channeled to field workers who do clean up—but not before they photograph the pileup from handheld tablets. They snap more shots after the job is done that are uploaded into a customer management system.
The wireless tablets and their built-in cameras are proving a real asset for Public Works, says Rachel Gordon, spokesperson for that city department.
“It’s how we document that the job was completed and the service order was properly closed.
“We also rely heavily on the data to track where the problem areas are and to understand where to deploy resources. And we’ve gotten smarter at how we leverage that data,” she says.
Tweaked dashboards enable capture of more targeted intel that’s analyzed for deeper insight into trends—maybe neighborhoods experiencing an uptick in illegal dumping or where buildings are getting smeared in defacing graffiti.
Now San Francisco is wrapping up a pilot that is testing bins outfitted with AI-powered sensors alerting when those bins are nearly full. There are 2,900 of them scattered across the city—some that need to be emptied several times a day.
The city likes what it’s seen so far. The plan is to swap out the whole fleet of receptacles by 2026.
“The system enables us to let our [contracted hauling service provider] know in real time when the cans are nearing capacity so they can quickly respond. It also tells us if they are emptying them as often as outlined in our agreement. It’s been very helpful as we can’t have human eyes and ears on every can,” Gordon says.
On the collection and processing side, San Francisco city contractor Recology leverages AI, cameras, and other technology to boost route efficiency, help drivers see what is happening around their trucks, reduce contamination, and increase material recovery.
Many of the bells and whistles work inside Recycle Central—a materials recovery facility operating on San Francisco’s cargo marine terminal, Pier 96. The 185,000-square-foot-plant processes about 500 tons of commingled materials every day.
The biggest change the crew has seen is a sizable increase in the volume and variety of incoming plastics, says Robert Reed, Recology spokesman.
Optical and robotic sorters have done well in keeping up with this fast-evolving stream. And they are getting faster and smarter, able to recognize and pick out more plastic types.
Optical sorters remove lightweight film plastics as they move down conveyor belts carrying recycled paper, and they separate clear PET water bottles, clamshells, and HDPE from other containers.
As with plastics, there’s been a steady climb in cardboard over the years, driven by surging on-line shopping. Larger fiber screens and a dedicated cardboard screen have been the answer to this boom, while magnets and an eddy current separator capture soup, vegetable, and aluminum cans.
Overall, the build out of high-tech infrastructure is inching San Francisco closer to a fast-approaching goal: 50 percent waste diversion from landfill and incineration by 2030.
As urban areas across the map grow denser, more municipalities are leaning on technology to do some of the work that is traditionally done manually in the waste world.
The menu of options is large. Pneumatic pipes running below large dumpsters use negative air pressure to send waste on for processing, eliminating the need for collection trucks.
Solar-powered trash compactors condense receptacles’ contents to make more room. Many of them have sensors similar to those on San Francisco’s bins, informing when it’s time for a pickup.
Block chain is emerging as a promising technology. It’s a computerized ledger system, enabling tracking of waste from source generation to disposal. Some cities tout it as instrumental to raising recycling rates and landfill diversion.
Today, connected apps tell operators what is happening in and around their trucks. For a while 360 cameras were considered the latest and greatest way to monitor this activity. But today cameras are looking into the hoppers, with data streams coming from them that generate advice, Mike May, GFL chief information officer, said during a Waste360-hosted Chief Information Officer Roundtable.
As an example, he pointed to how LiDAR sensors go beyond simply capturing high-resolution video by converting it into meaningful data and analyses.
IoT and the cloud enable data collectors and sensors to be connected to almost any app, practically anywhere, providing an amazing opportunity to optimize routes while minimizing fuel use and investments in more trucks, Rob Fisher, LRS chief information officer, shared in that same roundtable.
“I think we are just scratching the surface as far as where value can be added with IoT,” he said.
While waste management sectors have historically been slow to buy into evolving technologies, this is changing—especially as population centers grow, alongside their trash volumes. With that, a lot of what’s transpiring in this space is happening in urban settings. Stay tuned to hear what other cities are doing. We have a compelling tech tale to share that comes from New York City.
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