Startup's Black Box Tells Cities When To Empty Trash Cans

If you're walking down a city street with garbage in your hand, you look for a trash can. When all the trash cans are full and they start to overflow, the city street starts to look like garbage. A startup has figured out a way to alert cities before trash cans start to overflow. The technology uses lasers, of course.

The startup is called Nordsense. Its device is like a black box, monitoring the contents of trash cans and letting garbage haulers know when it's time for cans to be emptied. The first U.S. city to sign on is San Francisco, California.

The company's sensor, or pod, works by peering down on trash from inside the lid of a trash can, or via angled brackets in a dumpster or lidless container.

The sensor "shoots multiple independent laser beams onto the waste surface and calculates the distance for each of those," says company founder Manuel Maestrini. 

"This allows us to be extremely accurate as to when to dispatch someone to pick up the container" and not be too sensitive to false positives such as an oddly shaped object in a container.

Nordsense started in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2014 and came to California's Silicon Valley in 2015 via Innovation Centre Denmark. San Francisco took in the company through STIR, a Startup in Residence program that pairs startups with city government to find solutions to problems.

Smarter Waste Management

You can imagine how inefficient it is to try and figure out how often to empty trash bins on a block, or a city of blocks, without such technology.

In Copenhagen, it's been established that 90% of trash bins aren't full when they're being serviced and 40% are less than 25% full, according to Nordsense.

"We generally see that we can reduce the number of collections by 50%," Maestrini says, though bins in high-activity places like San Francisco may need to be emptied more frequently to help keep the streets cleaner.

A 2018 pilot project in San Francisco involving 48 sensor-equipped trash bins virtually eliminated overflow complaints from the public and produced an 80% drop in the number of overflow bins serviced, according to the company and a news report, along with a 64% drop in illegal dumping and a 66% reduction in street cleaning. San Francisco is now equipping 1,000 of its 3,000 sidewalk trash cans with the sensors, according to NBC Bay Area.

The sensor is only part of the Nordsense system, which comes with an online platform of analytics, predictions, route planning and resource management tools, as well as a smartphone app for in-truck navigation. Real-time routes are dynamically updated as containers become full. There's a monthly subscription fee per device.

While San Francisco is the first U.S. city to use the sensors, Maestrini says the company's tech also is being used in Canada, Switzerland and Austria in cities, facilities and railway stations. The U.S. and European Union are the main targets for future installations, and news on additional U.S. cities running "the Nordsense solution" will be announced in the spring.

"We see a range of ambitious cities that for a variety of reasons want to use our tech," Maestrini says.

The main driver in San Francisco has been an urgency to keep the city cleaner. The main focus in Copenhagen was on operational efficiency.

"We do however also see cities who want to push the technology even further. The predictions we make are the foundation of understanding waste generation patterns and may even in the future be used to explore if waste generation can be predicted or recycling rates improved.

"Algorithms continuously grow more sophisticated and machine learning adds new lawyers to what we can do with data. Many cities have 'zero waste' ambitions that the data we provide can support."