Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping the world, and the waste management industry is no exception.
As companies leverage new technologies to gather mass volumes of data, AI is playing a vital role in quickly presenting that information in a manner that allows firms to improve their operations.
“I would tend to bet that AI will disrupt the industry in ways that you can’t predict right now,” Mike Malatesta, CEO of North Mankato, Minnesota-based LJP Waste Solutions, said during a panel discussion at Waste Today’s Corporate Growth Conference in Chicago recently. “But what I’ve personally done and what our leadership team has done is use AI to increase our own productivity, our own thinking process and our own ability to make progress on things.”
Using tools effectively
AI might be very powerful, but at the end of the day, it’s just a tool. Mike May, chief information officer at GFL Environmental Inc., based in Miami, said AI alone does not generate value—it needs to be used by the right people and within the right processes. Once company leadership decides what GFL’s business priorities are, it falls on the technology side to deliver the tools.
May added that to get the most out of AI, it must be provided the proper context. Once the technology has a foundation of the correct information to build on, it will learn to adapt.
“The world is betting, especially in North America, on AI being a really huge transformation,” May said. “I don’t know who’s going to pay for all that capital, but our job is to figure out how to turn that into value. At GFL, we don’t see it as being this magical, ‘Buy AI and then, suddenly, everything will get better.’ We see it as the sum of tens and maybe hundreds of little improvements across the board.”
Dave Young, vice president of digital at Environmental Solutions Group, part of Norwalk, Connecticut-based Terex Corp., said the company’s 3rd Eye truck cameras and integrated smart technology systems process roughly 3.5 million pictures daily. It would be impossible for a human to sift through all that data, but AI can process, analyze and quantify all those pictures at a rapid pace.
Kish Rajan, CEO of Concord, California-based Mt. Diablo Resource Recovery, said his company is pleased with the 3rd Eye technology, adding that it was one of the first new pieces of technology Mt. Diablo Resource Recovery brought into its operations. The company operates about 120 collection vehicles that it uses to serve residential and commercial customers.
“It has been a tremendous tool because it’s giving us all kinds of information, all kinds of data, that we can use to measure and assess our performance across all of those areas,” Rajan said.
“We’re not going to commission AI projects, but what I want to know from [it] is: How are the tools getting smarter? How are the capabilities getting enhanced so that it’s driving toward those core results that I’m looking for? As a customer, I just want all of the tools that we’re buying and deploying to demonstrate that they have the capacity to improve and deliver better results for us.”
Learning on the fly
The more data the technology receives, the more AI can adapt, but it’s also important for the people administering the technology to ensure it adapts appropriately. Best Trash CEO Mark Moderski, based out of Richmond, Texas, cited an example of when his company used AI to detect cellphone use inside the cabs of its trucks.
When the company first rolled out the technology, he said the system would send alerts any time the drivers did anything with their hands. The alert included a video of the supposed transgression and an option for the administrator to provide feedback as to whether it was a valid alert. While initially that resulted in the annoyance of having to frequently tell the AI ‘No,’ Moderski said, eventually, the AI started to adapt. The false alerts decreased dramatically after the first six months.
“Yeah, it can’t do that now, but how long until it can?” Malatesta said of AI’s ability to evolve without human intervention. “If a human is able to look at the data and make decisions, those inputs make their way in, and the AI is going to figure out how to do it, maybe not 100 percent, but it’s going to figure out a lot better than you relying on one person.”
Read and react
Best Trash also has integrated 3rd Eye into its operations and leverages the tremendous amount of data it generates. The challenge for the company is how to translate the data in a way that helps the business run more effectively.
“The technology is certainly making the processing of this tremendous amount of data much faster,” Moderski said. “It does it in real time, instantly, and when you get the confidence level that it’s a real answer, it’s going to be very, very powerful.”
The data get rolled up automatically into a dashboard, so Best Trash can easily measure the results and adjust its staffing levels to match call volume trends.
“We can react instantly now on the customer service side.”
— Mark Moderski, Best Trash
“The data was always available, but it was on spreadsheets, and you had to go back in the system, and it was a very time-consuming process that made it hard to react,” Moderski said. “We can react instantly now on the customer service side.”
Best Trash has seen tangible benefits from integrating AI into customer service. The platforms it uses enable the firm to measure call data and chat and email volume, showing how many times a particular customer called, how long that customer was on the phone and whether the issue was resolved.
Rajan saw similar results using AI in customer service at Mt. Diablo, adding that the industry, in general, has a very local, phone-centric customer service tradition. His company used AI to add flexibility for customers, like text messaging and chat services, to address their issues without having to call an agent.
“AI starts getting us to a place where the automated systems inside of our customer service platforms can do much more around helping the customer through their issue and to help us be much faster around issue resolution,” Rajan said.
Knowledge meets intelligence
The more knowledge AI is fed, the greater its potential, and May said legacy employees who hold a depth of institutional knowledge can improve the effectiveness of AI-powered tools.
Even without factoring in AI, Malatesta said companies constantly face the challenge of passing down industry knowledge from veterans who are nearing retirement.
May added that AI can assist in capturing that institutional knowledge, but some employees can view that information as job security.
Rajan described his company’s 3rd Eye-equipped trucks as rolling data centers that gather incredible amounts of information daily. This allows AI to help with routing, measuring equipment performance and evaluating overall operational performance.
“You can’t fully automate our industry,” Rajan said. “People are still going to continue to be important in management, in administration and certainly in operations. People are going to be critical. But there’s no doubt that learning can come through AI.
“There’s just simply no question that the advanced learning that AI is producing is going to inform the way we operate our businesses in ways that are, that were, unimaginable without it.”
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