Challenges:
Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council in Ireland, faced the common challenges of reduced resources for waste operations and inadequate capacity of existing bins. A destination port town in close proximity to Dublin city center, Dún Laoghaire regularly encounters large volumes of people and public space waste. Keeping up with the waste created by residents, businesses and, and influx of tourists served difficult for the port community as their litter bins filled more frequently than they could be collected – leading to overflows and streetscape litter. Ireland’s unpredictable weather added an additional dimension to the problem.
Solution:
Dún Laoghaire Council deployed Bigbelly as an innovative approach to do more with fewer resources. The Council extensively trialed the Bigbelly system, then moved from a small pilot to a full-scale implementation in 2014. Over 420 smart stations were installed to replace all 530 traditional litter bins. The Bigbelly units were installed in similar locations to the existing bins and the total bin footprint was reduced by removing redundancies – bins in close proximity to each other. The Council was also able to extend waste collection to include entrances to large and mid-sized parks.
Smart collection notifications transformed the day-to-day operations for the Council by only picking up when bins were ready to be collected. The project, managed by the County Council by the Environment Department, was on a mission to improve the efficiency of waste management across the community.
Despite a reduced bin footprint, total capacity increased by 450% from 45,000 to 250,000 liters. This new capacity plus Bigbelly’s enclosed design nearly eliminated overflowing bins and significantly decreased hours required for waste collection as well as street sweeping and litter clean up.
Required collections reduced from an average of 6.5x to 1.6x per week thanks to Bigbelly’s unique compaction technology and centralized software. Each morning, a collection list is printed of bins that need to be emptied. This enabled the council to reduce the number of trucks used daily from 4 to 1, save 75% on fleet operating costs, and to redeploy 60% of collection staff to other services within the Council. The following brief video describes the process:
http://bigbelly.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Bigbelly-Smart-Waste-and-Recycling-System.mp4