Recycling Bin Monitoring System

Recycling bin monitoring system
Solar Bins
Team Members
Point of Contact	John Younes
Participating Municipalities	City of Safety Harbor, Florida
Status	Launched
Website	https://ecabna.com/
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Description

The City of Safety Harbor has challenges with trash bins overflowing from too many cans or bottle that are put into bins during busy times and congested areas. Also, there are instances in which the pick-ups are nearly empty. The City of Safety Harbor is wishing to optimize their pick-up with the addition of monitored recycling containers.

Challenges

The public recycle cans, especially if they do not have compactors, are emptied at a regularly scheduled pick-up dates and routes. This creates an inefficient situation in which recycle trucks either pick up from near empty cans or full cans are not picked up until the regular schedule. This results in inefficient routing as well as blight or lessened citizen participation in recycling when there is overflow.

Kyra Solutions will use Litmus Automation's technology to make the system more efficient and effective. It will either replace or retrofit existing recycle cans with sensors that give alerts by text or email when the cans reach a predetermined load for pick up. The City will then be able to visualize in real-time the capacity of all the recycling bins in the city.

Major Requirements

• Create scope and requirements, project plan
• Acquire necessary sensors and hardware needed
• Install sensors on bins and provision to Litmus Platform
• Create application development team, develop mobile application and web dashboard
• Create alerts for city based on appropriate thresholds
• Run Pilot for 2 months

Performance Targets

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)	Measurement Methods
Optimize recycling pick-up to achieve 0% bin overflow cases and reduce near-empty pick-up trip routes measured in miles or time by 25%	Measurement of amounts of trip that the recycling trucks make. Measurement of amount overflowed recycling bins.

Standards/Interoperability

• Establishes standardized procedures for recycling bin pickup services.
• Litmus Automation IoT Platform provides interoperability to any sensor or hardware device that is available.
• Litmus Automation also adheres to global communication standards for IoT such as MQTT, LWM2M.

Replicability, Scalability, and Sustainability

• Many cities are likely to face the exact same challenge, as it is very common for recycling bins or trash cans to overflow.
• By saving resources for the City, and other external benefits, the City is likely to continue using this scenario.
• This project can be scaled up to other similar scenarios such as Trash Can monitoring system and optimization of trash pickup. All technologies used are standard, easy to scale, and interoperable.

Demonstration/Deployment

Phase I Pilot/Demonstration June 2016

Phase II Deployment June 2017

Litmus Automation will be providing its technology platform for collecting data from sensors and providing real-time representation of that data on the dashboard, as well as monitoring and alerting.

Real-time monitoring of recycling bins in a City will be demonstrated and the whole scenario can be demonstrated live at the GCTC Expo. The dashboard applications used to monitor the recycling bins can be shown on display, showing the live data at the City of Safety Harbor. Also, thresholds can be simulated to show how the alerting mechanism works. The results of the Pilot will also be demonstrated.