Luxury or necessity?

Technology continues to advance across all sectors, and the waste industry is no exception. Asset tracking technology, a catchall term for a broad range of services that provide haulers and municipalities with key insights into their assets, has gained popularity in recent years. For waste management providers, tracking assets such as collection carts and drop-off containers can help provide efficient and accurate service.

Mike Marchetti, chief technology officer at Wastequip, says that asset tracking plays an important role in multiple industries but can be particularly valuable for the waste and recycling industry.

“It provides companies with visibility into where their assets are deployed, who has their assets, the maintenance history of those assets and their warranty status,” he says.

Wastequip, headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, manufactures an asset-tracking technology called Wasteware.

Asset tracking typically includes a multitude of services, but it is most commonly used by firms to locate misplaced or stolen carts. The technology also can provide haulers and municipalities with data on carts active in the field, current inventory, reorder points and route optimization.

Paul Bischof, Samsara’s head of product management for the firm’s Smart Trailers and the Connected Equipment team, says asset tracking can monitor collection bin reporting for service verification. Samsara, a San Fransisco-based technology company, manufactures a portfolio of management technologies for both unpowered and powered assets.

Bischof says another type of technology the industry is developing is a sensor to monitor the weight or amount of material in a container, indicating when a bin needs to be collected.  

“The sensor component is going to be another minority aspect of these devices,” Bischof says. “In that case, it’s more about an event. It’s not about location.”

How it works

Asset tracking technology often uses scannable barcodes or quick-response (QR) codes printed on an asset, or radio frequency identification RFID tags embedded inside.

“Barcodes, QR codes and RFID are all slightly different but used for the same thing,” Marchetti says. “At their root, they contain encoded data. It can be as simple as a serial number or as complex as containing the item number, color, size or other information.”

He explains that RFID has advantages for the waste industry compared with barcodes and QR codes. Because of the nature of scannable codes, they often are used as temporary identifiers because they can be worn away over time, making them unreadable. RFID is more protected and has the ability to last for years or even decades, making it a more permanent solution.

“[RFID] can also be scanned just by being in the range of [the container] and can be bulk scanned,” Marchetti adds.

Landon Hutchinson, sales and field services manager at Grand Rapids, Michigan-based Cascade Cart Solutions, says that every cart manufactured by Cascade has an RFID card embedded into the top rim.

“These are scanned into our proprietary program, and that information provides a lot to the customer,” he says regarding Cascade’s CartLogic software, a web-based, cloud-managed software solution for tracking, maintaining and reporting on waste, recycling and organics cart fleets. “With that scan, we can provide a serial number; we can provide the RFID signature; we can provide a specific latitude and longitude; [and] we can offer the physical address location of that cart.”

Hutchinson says CartLogic operates through a scanner that the user attaches to a cell phone. Other forms of asset tracking often use cloud-based software accessible through a mobile app.

The benefits of asset tracking

Cost savings associated with asset tracking typically come down to haulers and municipalities understanding what inventory they have and where it is located.

“There’s a significant amount of money placed into the overall cost of carting a community,” Hutchinson says. “The largest cost-saving ability is knowing what inventory you have. It’s keeping inventory at a manageable level [and] not overextending yourself on total capital spend on new assets.”

Municipalities can minimize hauler contract costs by only paying for assets that are in the field and actively being serviced, Marchetti explains. Conversely, haulers can prove they are completing service requirements for the municipalities they serve.

Asset tracking also can improve the customer service experience. If a customer calls a hauler regarding a cart at a residence, service representatives can use asset tracking technology to know what assets a customer has, as well as any past or missed services, Marchetti says.

Hutchinson says having direct access to single-cart information also may save travel time for haulers and municipalities. Rather than relying on the customer to relay cart information, servicers can arrive at a residence with the information needed by searching the name or code associated with that cart in their own database. Sensors used to determine when a bin is full can play a role in decreasing travel time, as well, since only necessary trips are taken to collect contents. 

Encouraging adoption

In the past, some haulers viewed asset tracking as an unnecessary and costly purchase, but views on the technology are changing.

Bischof says the hesitancy some haulers and municipalities have for adopting asset tracking is because they are wary of digitization, and that transferring processes that have traditionally been done on paper to a digital system can take time.

“I think about industries and their digital transformation journeys… [and] it takes a while. There are a lot of industries today that have built robust processes on paper, on repetition, on refining themselves to a certain workflow,” he says. “In order to digitize things, it can be a little scary.

“But what they find is there’s this real value when you start to go on that journey. You start to get more visibility of all the inefficiencies in the things you didn’t know about that you probably should have.”

Both Hutchinson and Marchetti agree that customers want an easy-to-use solution. In the past, asset tracking technology had too many moving parts, causing higher costs, Hutchinson says.

Asset tracking initially gained popularity among municipalities looking to compensate for less advanced technologies when compared to private companies that are quicker to adopt industry innovations, Hutchinson explains. Through word of mouth between municipalities, the use of asset tracking has spread, but the burden of encouraging adoption ultimately falls on the manufacturer.

“It’s important for us to work in partnership with a municipality or hauler to show them the ROI [return on investment] the software provides,” Marchetti says.

Asset tracking, as with most technological innovations, was created to make work easier. As more haulers and municipalities adopt asset tracking systems and overall accessibility increases, the technology may become a necessity rather than a luxury.

“[Asset tracking] has already taken off, but it’s going to be the norm rather than the exception across the country,” Hutchinson says.

The author is the digital editor for the Recycling Today Media group and can be reached at tkazdin@gie.net.