How it works
How sensor-led collection works
From an accurate bin register to a round that rebuilds itself every morning — and the honest version of what it takes to get there.
Getting from a fixed timetable to sensor-led collection takes about four to six weeks to pilot and runs in five stages: survey the bin estate and take a baseline, install the sensors, connect and calibrate them, switch round planning over to live data, then measure and rationalise.
Nothing here requires you to change vehicles, depots or crews. The change is which bins the waste collection round visits, and on which day.
The five stages
Survey the estate and take a baseline
We work through your bin register with you: container type, capacity, GPS position, current collection frequency and who does the lifting. This stage is unglamorous and it is the one that decides whether the project works. Vejle's operations team are explicit that a clean location database, owned by one named person, is the precondition for everything downstream. At the same time we record what you spend today — lifts, hours, mileage, fuel — because without a baseline there is no business case at the end, only anecdote.
Install the sensors
Each radar sensor is a sealed, shock-resistant unit that mounts inside the lid or in the top of the container. No wiring, no mains power, no modification to the bin. Around ten minutes per unit including registering it against the right container in the software — operations managers on existing deployments fit their own replacements while out on the road. For semi-buried and communal containers, mounting position matters, and we set it during install: Fanø's early accuracy problems were solved by repositioning the sensor to avoid false returns.
Connect and calibrate
Sensors report over NB-IoT, a low-power mobile network that runs on existing UK telecoms infrastructure and holds a signal in the places that defeat ordinary connectivity — below ground level in semi-buried containers, inside metal housings, in rural bring sites. Typical reporting is six readings a day; the hardware supports up to 60 where demand justifies it. Over the first few weeks a learning algorithm tunes each sensor to the specific geometry of its container, so accuracy at the critical 80–90% threshold improves as it goes.
Switch round planning to live data
The platform generates the round automatically — Vejle's is calculated at 05:00 every morning — picking up every container over its threshold and sequencing them into an efficient route. Thresholds are yours to set, and 80–90% is the usual starting point. Drivers get the round on a tablet with live fill percentages, locations and navigation, confirm each lift, and flag damage or contamination where they stand. Crucially they can see why a bin is on the list, which is what makes them trust it.
Measure, report and rationalise
Once you have a few months of history, the interesting work starts. Fill curves show which locations are genuinely busy and which have been over-served for years. Some bins turn out to be redundant — Vejle began removing overlapping bins on the evidence, without reducing the service residents actually experience. Complaint responses become a timestamped record rather than a guess. Mileage and CO₂ reductions become a number you can put in a climate report, and lift counts become the number you take into the next contract negotiation.
Timeline
What a first 90 days looks like
A pilot is deliberately small: one round, or one geographic cluster, big enough to be representative and small enough to be reversible.
| Stage | Typical duration | What you get at the end |
|---|---|---|
| Discovery & scoping | 1–2 weeks | An agreed pilot round, a bin register we both trust, and a written baseline of current cost, lifts, hours and mileage. |
| Provisioning | 2–3 weeks | Sensors configured and SIMs activated against your specific container list before anything leaves the box. |
| Installation | 1–3 days | All pilot containers instrumented and reporting, with mounting positions set per container type. |
| Observation | 2–4 weeks | Live fill data with collections unchanged — so you can see the gap between the timetable and reality before changing anything. |
| Live sensor-led rounds | Remaining 6–8 weeks | Dynamic rounds in the driver app, with weekly reporting on lifts avoided, mileage saved and threshold breaches. |
| Review | 1 week | Measured before-and-after against your own baseline, and a costed rollout plan — or a clear answer that it is not worth it here. |
What we need from you
Three things decide whether this works
Deployments that struggle almost always struggle for the same reasons, and none of them are technical.
- An accurate bin register. Type, capacity and GPS position for every container. If your data is patchy, say so early — surveying it properly is a fixed, one-off cost and far cheaper than discovering the gaps mid-rollout.
- One named owner. Somebody who can coordinate across highways, waste, fleet and IT, and who owns the location database. Every successful deployment we can point to has this person.
- Drivers brought in early. Crews are quick to spot that fewer lifts might mean fewer hours, and they need a straight answer about what the freed-up time is for. Where it has gone well, that time was redeployed to litter picking, fly-tipping and grounds work that was already overdue.
Questions
Deployment questions
Do we have to change our vehicles or depot arrangements?
No. Sensor-led collection changes which containers a round visits and in what order, not what lifts them. Existing vehicles, crews, depots and lifting equipment all stay as they are. The driver receives the round on a tablet or phone instead of a printed sheet or a memorised route.
What fill threshold should we set?
Most deployments start at 80–90%. Vejle flags bins at 80%; Langeland typically adds a container to the round at 80–90%. The right number depends on how much headroom you need between the reading and the visit: a rural site collected every few days needs a lower threshold than a town-centre bin you can reach the same afternoon. Langeland also runs an extra data check every Wednesday to catch containers likely to become critical over the weekend, which is the kind of local rule the platform is designed to accommodate.
How do you handle bins that fill unpredictably or seasonally?
That is the case sensors handle best, because a fixed timetable cannot. Fanø's population swings between 3,000 and 50,000 across the year and its containers fill anywhere between one day and several weeks; forecasting uses each container's own history alongside live readings, so it adapts rather than assuming last month's pattern holds. For known events — a festival, a bank holiday weekend, a match day — you can raise reporting frequency and tighten thresholds for the period.
What happens if a sensor fails?
The platform monitors sensor health centrally and flags units that stop reporting or are running low on battery, so failures surface before they cause a missed collection rather than after. Reliability in the field has been high: Langeland reported one defective unit out of 220 in the first four months and no battery replacements in a year. Replacement is a ten-minute job and is covered under the subscription.
Can we start with one round rather than the whole authority?
Yes, and we recommend it. Every deployment worth citing started small: Stralsund began with 35 bins, Langeland with about ten sensors before scaling to 220, and Vejle ran a single trial route before a council decision to roll out across the municipality. A pilot on one representative round gives you real numbers from your own operation to take to a committee, which is a far stronger paper than any supplier's brochure.
Next step
See what your own bin data would say
A 90-day pilot on one round tells you exactly how much of your current collection effort is going to bins that were not full. No commitment beyond the pilot, and you keep the data.