TECHNOLOGY-SAVVY COUNTY COUNCIL PARTNERS WITH SMARTBIN

Technology-savvy county council partners with SmartBin to make its collections ready for the 21st century and beyond.  

TRURO, England, JUNE 28, 2010  – Facing an unsustainable landfill-usage future and a growing recycling regulatory infrastructure, Cornwall County turned to SmartBin and its revolutionary bin-fill monitoring technology and services to improve recycled-material collections and reduce costs.

 

Illustrating how its technology and services can help governments at all levels more efficiently and effectively manage their recycled materials collections, SmartBin, the world’s leading recycled waste management information company, was chosen as the partner to take Cornwall County’s recycling initiative into the future. Seeking to establish a robust automated solution that could remotely monitor recycling-material containers and ensure that the existing stock of such public recycling banks were being used and managed optimally at an optimal cost, Cornwall needed technology that could be found only with SmartBin.

 

SmartBin’s singular bin-fill monitoring technology provides up-to-the-minute, real-time information about the exact level of fill in all collection bins, dramatically reducing the cost of collections, providing indisputable documentation of chain of possession and disposition of those materials, and helping customers to achieve compliance with ever-stricter waste management regulations. And SmartBin’s technology is scalable to any type of recyclable material, including textiles, paper, glass, plastic or aluminum.

 

The leadership council of Cornwall, a county located on the U.K.’s southwestern tip, had become acutely aware of the unsustainability of continuing to send waste and garbage to a landfill, and was witnessing increasing political pressure from national and EU directives/regulations to increase recycling rates. However, the council also realized that it had to achieve more efficient, effective recyclable materials collections with a budget already stretched by the recent economic crisis, which had reduced tax and fee revenues. Like many governing councils, authorities and municipalities worldwide, Cornwall faced an extremely challenging couple of years -- the current economic climate means that they had to improve their service levels while operating from a reduced revenue base.

 

There was only one answer: The SmartBin Recycling Bank Solution. SmartBin’s remote sensor systems were implemented and pilot-tested on 16 widely dispersed recycling banks over a ten-week period throughout the county. The results were clear: SmartBin created obvious and significant new efficiencies that brought recycling collection productivity way up and costs way down. Prior to the pilot program, only one of the county’s bins had an average fill-level close to 100 percent when it was serviced; most other bins were emptied when they were only 40-percent to 70-percent full. And one bin was practically empty every time, yet the collection truck drove over 40 miles weekly, just to service this single bin.

 

As a result of the pilot program, however, trucks are now dispatched only when the central coordinating office can clearly see, based on data shown via the SmartBin web portal, that each bin is at or near capacity, saving vast amounts of manpower, fuel and time. Based on this experience, the Cornwall Council has declared that from now on, all bids for collection of recycling containers in the county will be subject to a requirement for inclusion of a SmartBin remote bin fill-level monitoring system. The council sees this tool as an essential part of its response in meeting its local, national and global responsibilities towards reducing waste to landfill.

 

“Cornwall is perfect example of how SmartBin can be scaled to any application, be it across the street or across the county or state,” says Mark McCarville, SmartBin’s Director & Founder. “SmartBin was developed to make the work of recycled materials collection both efficient and cost-effective, something that it has done, and will continue to do, for companies and governments alike.”