The way that we handle recycling,
and sustainability,
and waste management,
in the US is fundamentally broken.
The model that we’ve employed to manage municipal waste
is the same model that we employed all the way back
in the years of the Romans.
And that is to take all the waste,
all the stuff that we don’t want,
and stick it in a big hole in the ground.
When our residents, when consumers,
when they put their waste out on a curb,
and the truck comes by and empties their cart,
for them, right, it just went away.
But the thing is, is there’s no such thing as away.
There will come a day when our natural resources
are in such short supply because we didn’t design them to be recycled,
we’ll be digging that stuff out of landfills.
During my previous job working on climate change,
I visited numerous landfills,
including landfills in Addis Ababa in Ethiopa,
the Koshe landfill there, and in Johannesberg, South Africa,
as well as landfills around the US
and that experience showed to me just how
painful and how challenging
siting these landfills in various communities can be.
Landfills are designed to have the least amount of impact
on groundwater, and on air, as they can.
Nonetheless, our waste now is full of all kinds of toxic ingredients:
household chemicals, pesticides, herbicides, automotive chemicals.
Those things shouldn’t go in your trash, but they do.
And they are going to produce more leachate,
that’s the liquid that all mixes together,
the kind of trash stew, in a landfill,
and then they’re going to produce more landfill gases
from decomposition.
Methane gas is a byproduct of decomposition.
and it’s the strongest greenhouse gas.
Methane is 30 to 80 times more potent
in the atmosphere than carbon,
but methane provides the best opportunity for us
to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions in the short term.
We can actually avoid 0.3 degrees Celsius warming
as a result of reducing methane.
Cities are key to helping us to reduce our emissions overall.
The way that they are going to do that is by delivering services,
and delivering the the day-to-day infrastructure
in the most efficient way possible.
I’ve been on recycling probably for like 14 years,
and I knew it was going to go somewhere, so I
I liked picking up the bins, even when it was on the ground,
and throwing them over the top of the truck,
getting my exercise for that day, but, you know, a lot has changed.
In this industry, we’re considered the garbage men.
I like to consider myself as a garbologist.
(Laughs).
Our routes average between eight to nine hundred
homes serviced, per day.
So, if all the trucks are rolling with no problems
we can usually get the route done.
If not, then that’s where we have to start helping each other.
When I first got here,
there wasn’t
anything kind of modern or sophisticated
to efficiently route
or to track whether or not
collections had happened.
If anybody said their trash was missed
you know, we had a lot of go-backs.
And that’s expensive
and also
a little bit demoralizing at the end of a day.
You go out there, you do your route,
you think you do a good job.
And the supervisor approaches you and says,
”We have all these missed pickups.”
It was between about 50 and 60
complaints a day.
It was pretty wild how
thick that stack would be.
It’s time consuming,
uses unnecessary fuels,
it’s costly to the city,
as far as hourly wages.
So, having technology
to help us track those things
was very attractive.
The way Rubicon is fixing this model
is through aligning the incentives in the waste industry.
So, that’s really the reason that Rubicon exists.
And we have a long track record
over the last 12 years of
of helping customers save money
by diverting more waste away from landfill.
The garbage truck is unique
among municipal fleets,
because it’s the only vehicle
that goes up and down
every single street in the city,
at least once a week.
If we equip the garbage truck
with the right technology,
we can actually
allow a municipal government
to be proactive
in the way that it delivers service.
Our system is cloud based,
so the technology can be taken
in and out of the vehicles.
It runs on any smartphone
and that smartphone runs our
proprietary app.
That we’ve designed for drivers
and supervisors
to communicate back with their headquarters
and to log issues in the field.
When you come across an issue, for an example,
you come to a container
that’s overloaded,
contaminated load,
broken container.
Let’s say you see a
tree branch is sticking out
of a recycling bin,
I’ll open the bin,
take a picture,
submit it,
and it goes straight to the office.
So, when a customer calls
and maybe they say,
”Their cart wasn’t collected.”
We can look right on there and see
exactly where the driver is
on the route,
and say,
”Well, you know, that driver
was by your house at 8:30 a.m. this morning,
and your cart was supposed to be out at 8:00 a.m.
So, pull your cart out next week on time,
and we’ll see you then.”
Shirlene
is one of Rubicon’s
longest customers.
The city of Santa Fe,
has been one of our customers for years now.
We did a pilot project with Rubicon.
In the early days,
we were one of their beta cities.
They were very instrumental
as far as helping us
to understand their needs.
Because as we’ve asked for things
they’ve developed the software side
and implement them.
And so,
it’s just been a great partnership.
Hi Shirlene.
Hey Fred, welcome.
How’s it going?
Good to see you.
Good to see you, too.
What we’re doing now
with Santa Fe is
working on a fleet optimization.
Taking into consideration:
routes,
personnel,
resources such as their vehicles,
and working all of that in,
so that we can produce a
much more efficient operation.
I’m really excited to know
what are the updates on the
route optimization.
Oh sure, yeah.
You’re probably about a month or two
away from actually running some test routes.
That is so exciting.
It is.
Waste
can often be one of the top five
costs that a municipality faces,
and waste collection is
the most expensive part.
And so, a lot of cities are
looking for ways that they can
pick up the trash
as effeciently as possible
and then use that savings
to focus on recycling
and recycling education.
I’ve noticed a big change in the community,
hardly anybody would recycle here.
Once we went automated
the percentages in recycling
went high.
It was kind of a lot
for us to handle at first.
But then
we got used to it.
We’ve been working on
developing technology
to actually detect
recycling contamination
at the source.
What we’ve developed is a
machine-learning model
that actually recognizes
materials
as they are dumped into the hopper.
And then provides alerts
that a particular load has been contaminated.
Once we can start to narrow down
where the contamination is happening
That allows us
to target recycling education material
and then actually improve its effectivenes.
When I talk about
redesigning our systems,
which sounds really huge,
but that’s how we’ll get to zero waste.
People talk about the term “circular economy,”
you manufacture something,
you use the product,
you can recycle it, or compost it,
and whatever’s left
becomes the raw material
for the next product.
That’s the kind of system
we’re going to need
in order to get to zero waste.
Our entire solution is cloud based.
We use the AWS cloud
to power all of our technology solutions.
We have a number of machine learning models
that we’ve developed
in Sagemaker
to do everything from
confirming service,
to being able to do things like
detect potholes
and overflowing bins.
So, machine learning is really at the heart
of our vision of a smarter city.
And that all is enabled
by our work with AWS.
The challenges that Santa Fe has been working on
are the same challenges
that many, many American cities face.
We recently completed
a fleet optimization for
the city of Atlanta.
In that operation,
we were actually able to
save the city
about $700,000.
We’re also able to save them
about 4,000 tons of emissions.
I’m very hopeful at our ability to
overcome some of these challenges
when it comes to climate change.
As we scale,
greenhouse gas emissions
related to waste collection
will go down.
More effecient cities
are a key to solving climate change.
I know that I’m a part of a team that
is working for a better environment for
not only myself,
my family,
for future generations.
We all realize
we have a role to play
in climate change.
If you look at it
holistically,
it’s a daunting task.
But if we all just figure out
if we play our small role
collectively, we will get there.
The more we recycle,
the more it’s going to help our landfill,
and the gases that go up in the air.
So, I feel with Rubicon here
getting the customers to recycle
in the right way.
I see things improving, yes.
And there are days I feel like,
”I’ve been doing the same thing
for 20 years and nothing’s happened.”
But then I look around
and I realize
there are a lot of people who care
For the first time, there’s
multiple legislation
addressing a national recycling system.
We need to go a little faster,
but the hopeful thing
is that these conversations are finally happening.