ADMINISTRATION Changes Coming in Onboard Scales and ... · vehicle is overweight, it can’t stop...
Transcript of ADMINISTRATION Changes Coming in Onboard Scales and ... · vehicle is overweight, it can’t stop...
Changes Coming in Onboard Scales and Collection SoftwarePerformance, longevity, accuracy, and the ability to collect, handle and analyze the staggering amount of data are key issues for commercial haulers. BY DAN RAFTER
Roger Edberg had an important
mission in 2010. He’d just
taken over as senior superin-
tendent of the ground services
department at University of California,
Santa Cruz (UCSC), and one of his goals
was to divert as much campus waste as
possible from landfills.
Like many college campuses—and
municipalities—UCSC is working to boost
its recycling and composting efforts and
reduce the amount of waste it sends each
day to area landfills.
To help the university meets its new and
loftier diversion goals, Edberg needed more
information about the waste that the univer-
sity’s collection vehicles were collecting and
hauling. He needed data to tell him exactly
how much waste the university’s collection
vehicles were already trucking to landfills.
That’s where onboard collection soft-
ware—in this case, the LoadMan LM400
load management software from LoadMan,
a division of Creative Microsystems—came
in. The university has been piloting this
collection software since 2014. The Load-
Man software gives drivers the ability to
track load weights, load locations, the type
of products that they are hauling, and the
most efficient routes to complete their
pickups and dropoffs.
But what Edberg truly appreciates is
that the onboard software allows drivers to
instantly calculate the weight of a particular
load. This is important: In the past, drivers
for the university were only tracking their
collections by volume. This means that
the university would often undercharge
customers when they were picking up par-
ticularly heavy loads.
And that resulted in lost revenue for the
university during a time when every dollar
is of critical importance.
As Edberg puts it: “We’d charge the same
amount of money for a dumpster filled
with balloons as we would for one filled
with bricks.”
Today? Drivers at the university are
able to track whether a pick-up is heavier
than usual. The university can then charge
accordingly, helping to keep its bottom line
a healthy one.
“By charging by weight instead of by vol-
ume, we more accurately take into account
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Mettler Tole
do
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68 MSW MANAGEMENT [ SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015 ]
our costs,” says Edberg. “We can then charge
our customers correctly for the amount of
work we are doing. That has been such an
important change.”
Not a RarityEdberg is not the only solid waste profes-
sional realizing the benefits of onboard
scale and collection software. These twin
technologies can help solid waste drivers
immediately determine when their trucks
are reaching their maximum-allowable
weights. They can help them chart how
much a particular load weighs, so that they
won’t accidentally damage their trucks by
lifting a dumpster that is too heavy.
With onboard scales and collection
software, municipalities can make sure
that they are not undercharging—or
overcharging—the customers along their
routes. And, perhaps most importantly,
this technology helps drivers chart the
most efficient routes to and from collection
points, transfer stations, and landfills.
This information can reduce the
expenses of municipal solid waste districts.
Trucks that don’t travel too far, and don’t
haul loads that are too heavy, will require
less maintenance and fewer repairs. They’ll
consume less fuel. And that all adds up to a
more financially stable solid waste district.
These economic benefits are the reason
why so many municipalities are turning
to onboard collection software and scales
today, say the professionals working in this
industry.
Tricia Baker, marketing manager with
Eugene, OR-based Air-Weigh, says that her
company has long been passionate about
on-board scales.
But what’s good today is that Baker
and her peers at Air-Weigh are far from
alone: She says that a growing number of
municipal solid waste (MSW) officials are
now focused on providing their drivers
with the technology they need to calculate
the weights of their loads and run more
efficient routes based on the amount of
waste their vehicles are already carrying.
This is a trend that Baker says is good
for the industry, one that illustrates how
the MSW industry is becoming a more
mature one. The professionals oversee-
ing waste collection are more comfortable
with technology, and understand the cost
savings that scales and collection software
can provide.
“A lot of companies have been using
onboard scales for a long time. But we
are seeing a big change with solid waste
officials and managers talking about
weight in general,” says Baker. “Before, they
turned to onboard scales after something
went wrong. They wanted to use the scales
to make sure it wouldn’t happen again.
Now they are more proactive than they
have been in the past. They are now using
onboard scales to be more efficient.”
Air-Weigh offers two types of onboard
scales that municipalities can use to run
their fleets more efficiently.
The BinMaxx onboard scale tells truck
operators how much a particular gar-
bage bin weighs. This product, designed
mostly for front loaders, gives operators
the information they need to avoid pick-
ing up a bin so heavy that it will damage
their front-loaders. They can also use the
information provided by BinMaxx to make
sure that they don’t over- or undercharge
their customers.
“A bin that is full of engine blocks every
week should come with a higher charge than
one that is filled with cardboard,” says Baker.
Air-Weigh also offers LoadMaxx, which
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provides an overall weight of a truck at any given time. Baker says
that customers install this product for safety reasons. If a waste
vehicle is overweight, it can’t stop as quickly as it needs to.
“If it gets into a wreck and can’t stop, that is bad press if an
overweight vehicle is the cause,” she says. “Companies and munici-
palities don’t want that kind of press. By operating a truck at the
proper weight, they can avoid this potential problem.”
LoadMaxx can help reduce the maintenance costs on a waste
truck, too, Baker says. When operators drive their vehicles when
they weigh too much, it can cause unnecessary wear and tear on
them. If drivers are alerted by an on-board scale that they are driv-
ing a truck that is carrying too much waste, they can head back to a
landfill or transfer station to empty their load.
The reduced wear-and-tear pays off over the long run in the form
of lower maintenance costs and fewer big repair bills, Baker says.
Onboard scales can even provide good public relations for
municipalities, whether they use an outside contractor to pick up
their waste or whether they run their own fleet of vehicles. Over-
weight waste vehicles can severely damage streets, dotting them
with potholes and cracks, something that won’t make municipal
officials or residents who have to drive these streets happy.
But when operators drive trucks that meet a municipality’s
suggested weight limits? They are doing their part to protect that
municipality’s roads.
“Companies are proud to use these scales,” she says. “If you are
not running overweight trucks around your neighborhoods, you
are being a good citizen of the cities that you are serving. You are
protecting their roads and infrastructure.”
Diversion in Santa CruzFor a good example of how onboard scales and collection software
can benefit users, look toward California.
At the UCSC grounds, service officials study the data that their
trucks’ onboard software provides to determine if they need to
change drivers’ routes and if they are doing enough to divert waste
from landfills. They also study the data to make sure that they are
charging the proper fees for every customer, upping their fees appro-
priately for those clients with consistently heavier pick-ups.
“We now have a real-time knowledge of what is going on,” says
Edberg. “We can now understand the flow of material and how we
are managing it. It is great for our budgeting.”
The data stream from the onboard collection software is playing
a big role in the university’s efforts to boost the amount of waste it
recycles, Edberg says. That’s because grounds services officials can
now break down the weight of the waste materials that their drivers
are trucking to landfills from different sectors of the campus.
Edberg might discover that one part of campus is responsible for
the most waste month after month. Armed with this information,
the grounds services department can take actions to help the build-
ings and clients at this part of campus reduce the amount of waste
they generate.
“It helps us track down which sectors are diverting well, and
which need help,” says Edberg.
Edberg says that he would recommend onboard collection
software for any large-scale solid-waste operator. He says that the
university is now saving significant money by charging their custom-
ers according to weight instead of volume.
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72 MSW MANAGEMENT [ SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015 ]
And that’s something that never would have happened without
the benefit of collection software.
“We had always been estimating volumes when it came to collect-
ing waste,” says Edberg. “I thought that there had to be something
better out there. It seemed crazy that we couldn’t bill by weight
instead of volume. It didn’t seem realistic. Our software does every-
thing we want it to do. It does automated weighing, and it gives us a
centralized collection of data through the cloud.”
Alan Housley, vice president of marketing and product manage-
ment with Renton, WA-based Creative Microsystems, provider of
LoadMan onboard collection software, says that waste and recycling
professionals are evolving. Municipalities are demanding that waste
collection supervisors use technology to analyze their routes. The
goal is to reduce the costs of collecting waste.
At the same time, municipalities are increasingly setting new recy-
cling goals. They want their waste collection trucks traveling more
often to recycling centers than to landfills. This, too, is increasing the
demand for onboard scales and software, Housley says.
But the biggest change hitting the industry today? Housley says
that it’s coming from the customers of waste haulers. These custom-
ers, including municipalities that outsource their garbage collection
services, are demanding that haulers provide them with data showing
how much waste they’ve sent to landfills, and how much they’ve
diverted to recycling centers.
“There is a sea change going on in this industry right now,” says
Housley.
And onboard scales and collection software are at the forefront of
this change, he says, providing the numbers that so many customers
are now demanding from their haulers.
The MSW market is one of the leaders of this trend, Housley
states. And that’s because municipalities are placing a bigger empha-
sis on sustainability efforts.
“There was a time when city councils would request a sustainabil-
ity report from municipal departments once a year. It would sit there
and gather dust,” says Housley. “That has changed. Now they are
living, breathing documents that drive what municipalities are doing
to protect the environment.”
Municipalities that contract with outside haulers are increasingly
demanding that the companies they hire to collect their solid waste pro-
vide detailed data on how much of this waste they divert from landfills.
The goals of many of these communities is to significantly lower the
amount of waste that they send to landfills and increase the amount
they send to recycling stations and compost centers. Without onboard
software that charts how much waste trucks collect and where they bring
it, it’s difficult to determine whether haulers are meeting the diversion
goals set by the municipalities that hire them.
“The problem has always been that there are too many people in the
process,” says Housley. “You have a trucker with route sheets who has to
write down weights. That trucker turns the route sheets into administra-
tors who may or may not be there. Where did the paper end up? The
information on it has to be loaded into the computer by someone else.
“The hauler also has to get the landfill tickets. They might get
lost along the way. There is where you run into an integrity issue.
You may have accurate data on weight, but when you get to the total
weight, do you have the integrity of data? There are so many people
handling the papers.”
The waste-hauling industry today is moving quickly toward auto-
mating this collection and diversion data.
Housley says that the onboard collection software provided by his
company tracks 17 different types of information about every load
that haulers pick up.
“The entire process starts first with highly accurate scales and
ends with in-depth analysis of the data,” he adds.
Will the drivers of trucks, though, be able to adjust to the chang-
ing technology in their vehicles? Housley says that they will, as long
as their managers support them and offer the training that they need.
“If the drivers are trained they have no trouble at all,” he says.
“But if they are not trained properly, that is when they will have
challenges. People don’t like things that they don’t understand. As
soon as they understand it, the drivers love it.”
The key is for onboard collection software to be easy to use,
Housley says. The best systems will provide a touchscreen display
that differs little from drivers are used to from their iPads and smart-
phones. Drives merely have to touch the screen to tell the system
that they are picking up a scheduled load at a specific location. That
enters the necessary data into the system.
And that should be all that’s required of drivers whose collection
trucks are equipped with onboard collection software.
“That’s it,” says Housley. “It’s when they have to go through
screen after screen of information to get what they want. They’re not
trained for that. You need a very simple interface. When you have
that, drivers will adjust to the systems easily.”
The Most Efficient ScenarioOnboard scales and collection software, while productive tools for
MSW districts, are still not perfect, especially the onboard scale part
of the package. Steve Graham, vehicle segment manager with the
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Columbus, OH, office of Mettler Toledo, says
that onboard scales can lose their proper
calibration as waste trucks travel more miles.
Because of this, municipalities shouldn’t
rely solely on onboard scales to determine
how much solid waste their trucks are car-
rying. These scales are good tools to help
operators more efficiently plan their routes.
But drivers and municipalities shouldn’t be
surprised if the weights they provide are
sometimes not completely accurate.
Municipalities can more accurately
measure the amount of waste trucks are
hauling when these vehicles drive over
static scales built into the ground when
they are entering or leaving landfills or
transfer stations. These are the type of
scales in which Mettler Toledo specializes.
“We do see more municipalities using
onboard scales, and they are useful prod-
ucts,” says Graham. “There are definite
benefits to using them. They help drivers
plan out their routes. They help drivers
make sure they are getting their trucks as
full as possible—without going over weight
limits—as they head to a landfill or transfer
station. But the weights they provide are
not as accurate as what you get with a static
scale built into the ground.”
This is why Graham says that the most
forward-thinking of municipalities rely on
a combination of static in-ground scales
and onboard scales and collection software
to collect waste in the most cost-efficient
way possible.
“That way, drivers can get weight mea-
surements as they’re driving around,” says
Graham. “They can see that they are at 90%
of their trucks’ allowable weight. They then
know that they can hit one or two more
pick-ups before they have to head back to
the landfill or transfer station.”
And when those drivers are back at the
transfer station or landfill? They can drive
over an in-ground static scale to generate
the most accurate measures of the waste
that they are carrying.
Graham says that it’s good business
sense for municipalities to care about
accuracy. Those municipalities that aren’t
relying on the most accurate of scales
might end up with lost revenue because
they are not charging their customers
enough for the waste pickups they
provide them.
When selling their scales, officials
with Mettler Toledo focus on how the
accuracy of their static scales can help
municipalities earn the fairest prices for
the waste collection services they provide.
Municipalities should be compensated for
the correct amount of waste they collect.
Accurate scales make sure that they do not
accidentally short-change themselves by
undercharging their customers.
“We are trying to push the accuracy
message to our customer base,” says
Graham. “It is a bit of a tradeoff with the
price. Our line of static scales is priced
higher than some of our competitors.’ It’s
a premium brand. So we want to make
sure that our customers understand our
accuracy message. We seem to get the sale
once we explain to them how better accu-
racy can impact their bottom lines.” MSW
Dan Rafter is a technical writer and frequent
contributor.
For related articles: www.mswmanagement.com
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