Australian Waste-collection Businesses Tag Trash Bins

"There were a number of unique challenges and lessons," Clarke says. "As with all battery-powered Bluetooth connections, the connection does not persist all day, but is dropped when not in use, to conserve battery power." Tracient's reader, he says, allowed Datanet to implement a system that required minimal intervention from an untrained user when the connection dropped, thus allowing maximum battery-life conservation, and giving a full-day shift on a single charge. "Adding a human factor to an RFID system creates its own challenges, too. Getting non-technical users to understand the need for separation between tags when reading presented some challenges—particularly when matching one tag to one bin."

The system was tested over a three-month period, and was initially deployed at Mastec's head office. The Drop Manager software required approximately four hours of user training before the field trial was launched. According to Clarke, each Mastec contract differs in its requirements, so the exact return on investment is difficult to determine. But gathering the information would not have been possible using spreadsheets and manual entry, due to the size of the rollout.

Thanks to the system's simplicity, Brixton says, minimal training was required for the drivers, which was offered as a half-hour session before initial deliveries. In addition to labor-saving benefits, he notes, accurate data collection minimizes the number of revisits required when a bin has been incorrectly delivered.

The system paid for itself in the first 12 months, Brixton reports, and is already in use in Tasmania and South Australia, where bins are being tagged to confirm distribution to addresses. The system has reduced labor, he says, since users no longer need to manually input the details of bin distribution to each address, and record it on spreadsheets.

In the future, the system could also be adapted to record individual rubbish collection. Mastec is currently conducting a 120,000-bin rollout in New South Wales for waste-management firm JR Richards. According to Brixton, Mastec would continue to work with Datanet to further develop the system so that it could be used to monitor the collection of trash, recyclables and green waste.