EPA awards Phase II award to Zabble to advance technology

Zabble, a Walnut Creek, California-based provider of artificial intelligence- (AI-) powered zero-waste technologies, has earned a Phase II award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to develop its innovative Mobile Tagging platform further.

The award, granted through the EPA’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, will provide Zabble with funding to develop new features to help California jurisdictions, haulers and consultants meet the contamination monitoring requirements of Senate Bill 1383.

“This additional award from the EPA is a testament to Zabble's dedication to transforming waste operations through AI,” Zabble CEO Nik Balachandran says. “We're excited to leverage the support to further enhance our technology, empowering communities and waste management stakeholders to combat contamination effectively while meeting all regulatory requirements."

Zabble’s Mobile Tagging platform is a patented system that uses computer vision AI to track and monitor waste bin fullness, contamination levels and contents—with or without a wireless connection—for residential route reviews and commercial site visits. The collected data includes the date and time of the route review or site visit, fullness and contamination percentage of the container, associated contamination items and customer notification activity.

This solution streamlines required data collection and packages it for SB 1383 reporting requirements, enabling jurisdictions to do three times more lid flips than previous manual methods. By tracking systematic program information and contamination and outreach side-by-side, jurisdictions can correlate their outreach to tangible outcomes to reduce system-wide contamination and, therefore, reduce costs to waste generators, according to Zabble.

In Phase II of the project, Zabble will focus on the following four objectives:

• Develop an outreach tracker feature to automate education and outreach activities related to waste contamination.
• Integrate with jurisdictions and haulers’ commercial and residential account databases to provide a more holistic view of waste management data.
• Advance Zabble AI to identify and target critical contamination monitoring priorities more accurately.
• Integrate with third-party truck cameras to provide real-time data on waste bin contents and contamination levels.

“By achieving these objectives, Zabble will create a more robust and effective solution for contamination monitoring, one of a handful of critical pillars within the legislation,” Balachandran says. “This not only helps jurisdictions comply with SB1383, but it also helps to reduce the environmental impact of waste contamination.”

Zabble’s work on this project has received positive feedback from several jurisdictions in the Bay Area that have been using the Zabble platform for contamination monitoring since August 2023.