How can you make skip collection more efficient?
Well Ulrikke Lien from Norway, is an engineer who has decided to tackle this little known but vital part of the waste industry. She formed a company called Sensorita which looks at how full a skip is or isn’t.
Why should we care you ask? Well think about this, skips are often just picked up on schedules even if they are full or not, that means often you are wasting huge amounts of carbon driving to pick up half empty ones or ones that have nothing in them.
Ulrikke was a student when she had the idea to look into this.
“I started talking to a classmate who was analysing waste data and we were both quite shocked how little data they do have. How bad the data they have is. How can you improve such a core industry in our society, when you really have no foundation to build upon?
“Quite naively, I was an engineering student and I thought, who else in the world is more equipped to solve this problem than me?”
And so she started on a journey that has led to building a tiny sensor which can be stuck on a skip and will work out how full it is, where it is, plan the best pick up journey, all in a flash so that there are much fewer wasted trips by skip lorries.
“If you know three simple things volume, quality, location, all of these waste containers operate as a material storage, you can use that data to build a software that streamlines how waste flows throughout the value chain.
“We had to find a technology that could give us that information, which is easier said than done. But radar is actually really cool, it’s an old technology but it’s quite powerful because it can see through materials and the reflected signal will change depending on material.”
From that the sensor was built which can now use radar to see if a skip is full, or not and even work out what it contains, eg. building waste or metals, to see where it should be sent to improve recycling levels too.
Plenty more fascinating waste facts will be revealed just listen to the podcast now and please share and subscribe!