Making Waves

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has been around for years, but its use among recyclers and waste haulers has taken a while to be perfected and adopted. RFID can be used to track information such as location, pickup time and the weight of the material collected.

One of the most prevalent uses for RFID technology is in conjunction with recycling carts. RFID tags, which are passive electronic labels, are placed on each cart. A reader on the collection truck then collects data from the RFID tags on the carts as they are collected.

The technology can be useful, especially when trying to increase waste diversion rates, measuring collection efficiencies and tracking recycling carts.

EVOLVING TECHNOLOGY
Statesville, N.C.-based Toter, a Wastequip company that makes carts, first employed RFID technology on its refuse carts in 1989. Municipalities or haulers were using the technology to track which households were requesting carts for invoicing purposes, but it was a very narrow market, according to Jim Pickett, vice president of municipal sales. According to Pickett, RFID did not take off until the advent of single-stream recycling. Now, putting RFID tags on recycling carts is becoming the standard, even if RFID isn’t yet being utilized. He says about 50 communities have purchased carts from Toter with RFID tags.

“The majority of municipal programs for single-stream recycling at least require installation of an RFID tag on their new carts, even if the service provider, be it the city or collector, does not have a current plan to use RFID,” says Pickett. “They are seeing it as a future technology, if not a current one.”

Toter works with Beaverton, Ore.-based software company Routeware on its RFID technology. Steven Kaufman, senior vice president of Routeware, says waste haulers face the same logistics issues as any trucking company. When a hauler is making 800 to 1,200 stops per day, having to record information into a computer takes up valuable time, according to Kaufman.

“What we have the ability to do is put a reader on the truck, and every time the can is dumped, the reader reads the tag ID. It records the pickup automatically,” says Kaufman.

An early adopter and proponent of RFID technology in communities throughout the United States is New York City-based RecycleBank. The company began using RFID as a pilot program in Philadelphia in 2005. RecycleBank placed ultra-high frequency (UHF) tags on carts at 2,500 homes. RecycleBank used the UHF tags for about one year before realizing they didn’t provide the robustness the company needed, COO Scott Lamb recalls. RecycleBank looked at the technology that was being used in Europe, where he says RFID has been used to track recycling rates for the last 20 years. RecycleBank then migrated to a low-frequency tag.

RecycleBank had installed low-frequency tags for about three years and, according to Lamb, they were better suited to the collection environment. The drawbacks, however, were that the low-frequency tags were more expensive and that a rivet was required in the cart’s handle for installation. Therefore, in the last 12 to 18 months, RecycleBank has reverted back to the UHF tags.

Lamb says the company has found that the UHF tags are much more reliable than they were back in 2005 and are more cost effective than the low frequency version. Another benefit of the UHF tags is that they are easy to apply, says Lamb, because they can be embedded into a label, which can be mailed to a household with instructions on how to apply it.

RecycleBank serves approximately 150 different communities throughout the U.S. totaling 1.9 million households in 29 states. Lamb estimates 95 percent are using RFID.

“RFID is still very much the prevalent way for us to capture a collection event,” says Lamb. RecycleBank opted for RFID to identify the container and match it to a household instead of serial numbers or barcodes because they are more reliable, easier to read and tend to last.

“We found that RFID was the next most cost-effective way to identify that container and when it is being collected,” explains Lamb. He calls RFID “an industry best practice.”

RFID plays a big part in RecycleBank’s rewards program, which is based on the volumes households in a given neighborhood are recycling. The RFID technology is used to record the act of recycling and the amount of material recycled.

HOW IT WORKS
A household puts its recyclables out on the curb in a cart that has been labeled with an RFID tag. An RFID reader on the truck will collect information from the RFID tags on the containers placed out on its route as it dumps them. “At the end of the route, the truck knows who put out recycling on that specific day and sends that data back to our servers via cellular technology, and we also get the weight of all the material that was in that truck and we divide it among the number of folks who recycled in that day,” explains Lamb. “The more your community recycles, the more points you get. If you don’t set your cart out, you are not going to get any points for that collection day.”

The points obtained for recycling rates can be redeemed for rewards from RecycleBank’s partners.

Lamb points out that while the company adopted a European model for the technology, RecycleBank uses it differently. While Europe uses the pay-as-you-throw philosophy, charging residents based on the amount of trash collected, RecycleBank does just the opposite. “We are rewarding for the right thing rather than penalizing for the wrong thing,” Lamb says.

The data obtained also is used to target specific households with marketing and educational materials to help them increase their recycling rates. More recycling in a community means less money spent on landfilling. For example, Lamb says it costs an estimated $62 per ton to dispose of waste in Philadelphia. But if that community recycles, it can make $30 to $40 per ton in revenue. That translates into $90 per ton difference.

RFID also is used for service validation. If a customer claims his or her cart was not collected, there is now proof, which can save an expensive trip back out to the location. It also can help with route efficiencies by letting managers know trucks are where they should be.

Another way RFID is used in the waste and recycling industries is for asset maintenance. “For less than $1 to have some sort of asset tracking on a cart that costs $50 or $60 can make a lot of sense,” says Lamb.

COST FACTORS
In Howard County, Md., RFID is used solely to keep track of inventory. All 77,000 carts in the community have RFID tags. When the technology was first installed in 2007, the intent was to use the tags to do more than track inventory, but for Howard County it became too costly to use the technology for anything other than asset management.

“We don’t use [RFID tags] as several other communities do and as we originally planned—to see what areas were recycling really well,” says Evelyn Tomlin, Howard County chief of the Bureau of Environmental Services. “The plan was to use RFID tags to obtain that information; but, for us it was too cost prohibitive to do it.”

Having to install the computers and software on trucks covering 16 different routes, “just seemed cost prohibitive for what we were getting out of it,” Tomlin says, adding that the county is waiting to see if costs come down. She also notes that the technology appears to be more user friendly now than when Howard County first implemented RFID.

Using RFID tags has “made inventory very easy for us,” says Tomlin. And as far as using it for anything more, Tomlin says, “We will just continue to evaluate it.”

Joe Franz, principal and vice president of sales, Concept2 Solution LLC, Coraopolis, Pa., a provider of RFID software, admits that in some cases cost can be an inhibitor. He estimates the hardware and the technology to outfit a truck can cost nearly $5,000. He also says grant money may be available in some areas.

Franz says communities need to ask themselves what they are trying to drive out of their process. “If you are really trying to understand how participation is working for you in recycling, then how else are you going to do it without a hugely manual intensive process?”

RFID is still in its infancy, according to Franz. “It is not at a mature state or a declined state, it is at acceleration and growth,” he says.

Henry Bonnell, president of Aviant Systems Inc., New York City, a company that has provided RecycleBank with RFID technology, agrees that adoption of the technology will grow as budgets free up in communities and as telecom, data and monthly service rates decline.

“We really built this solution with the long-term vision of either pay as you throw or credit as you recycle, but also for mobile data capture to capture any type of data on a truck or moving vehicle,” says Bonnell.

Barry Grahek, CEO and president of DesertMicro, Scottsdale, Ariz., another company that offers RFID technology, says, “While people may be initially hesitant because of the cost associated with RFID technology—the RFID reader, RFID tags and implementation—the typical ROI is between 12 and 15 percent increased profit.”

DesertMicro and other providers of RFID technology offer integrated software that includes GPS (global positioning system) and AVL (automated vehicle locator) technologies in tandem with RFID technology.

While the public may perceive waste and recycling collection as simplistic, when RFID technology is combined with other emerging technology, such as GPS, collection of waste and recyclables is becoming a sophisticated, technologically advanced industry.