You can’t manage what you don’t measure. When it comes to business operations, data-driven insights are essential to good decision making. That’s no different when it comes to a business’s waste and recycling operations. Conducting a waste audit for your business establishes baseline measurements for materials generated in a given week. It’s a good first step in establishing an efficient waste and recycling management program. However, waste audits can be time and resource intensive and only capture information over a limited period of time, making it difficult to continuously know what’s going on with your waste operations at one location, let alone across your entire portfolio of locations.
Leveraging Waste Metering™ technology, powered by AI, cameras and sensors in dumpsters, can help automate near real-time data collection at scale. This can result in more regular auditing and delivery of data-driven service optimization, proactive hauler oversight, better recycling, and more accurate ESG reporting.
How Waste Metering™ improves your waste management program:
Read more from the Waste Watchers Blog!
1. data-informed service optimization
On average, dumpsters are serviced at only 51% fullness, so it’s likely your business is already overpaying for waste. But how much service do you actually need? And when do you need it? How does that differ from location to location?
Waste Metering™ offers a way for your business to monitor operational waste and recycling continuously and at scale. Sensors and cameras allow easy collection of near real-time data points, such as dumpster fullness, fullness at collection, stream contents and service events. Those data points are then analyzed by AI to better understand waste volumes and seasonal impacts to that volume, and identify opportunities for more recycling and service optimization.
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2. proactive hauler oversight
Staying on top of vendors is a major hassle for businesses, especially across multiple vendors and multiple locations. Waste Metering™ technology helps by automatically flagging when a hauler misses a scheduled pick-up, or when you might be at risk for overflows. It can notify support staff for quicker issue resolution, avoiding interruption to daily operations.
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3. reduce recycling contamination and cut ghg emissions
Recycling contamination often results in entire loads of materials being simply dumped into the landfill. An estimated 25% of recycling truck hauls are too contaminated to be taken to a recycling facility. With stream composition data derived from Waste Metering™ content analysis, your business can implement plans to reduce contamination and divert more waste from landfills.
Less material to the landfill means fewer GHG emissions. Landfills are the third largest contributor of methane emissions in the U.S. and methane has 80 times the atmospheric warming power of carbon. Getting serious about cutting emissions means your business has to get serious about cutting waste sent to the landfill.
Here are answers to some common recycling questions!
4. data-informed esg reporting
How can your business report accurately on Zero Waste initiatives, Scope 3 emissions reductions, and increased landfill diversion plans if you don’t have accurate data? Waste Metering™ offers quantifiable data to show progress and to verify if these programs are working.
Instead of estimations and guess work, Waste Metering™ accurately tracks waste and recycling by volume and weight. This enables us to provide industry-best data on exactly how much waste you are producing, how much you are recycling, and your related Scope 3 carbon emissions, by location or in aggregate, to meet your ESG reporting needs.
RoadRunner knows your business is unique
Your operational waste and recycling management program should be unique to your needs, too. Utilizing RoadRunner’s proprietary Waste Metering™ technology means your business gets the greatest ROI for your waste management program. RoadRunner’s comprehensive waste management service and technology stack can help analyze and implement the right waste program for your business, often at a lower cost than what you currently pay.
RoadRunner’s ability to accurately measure waste for your business empowers you with the business intelligence to make smart, accurate decisions to improve the efficiency of your operations.
