Driving efficiency and impact through real-time insight

Sensing solutions for 2020 and Beyond

Challenge

As technology advances and lifestyles change, consumer expectations increase. Financial pressures on local authorities and private enterprises continue to rise and the need to improve services to match growing expectations is ever-present.

Trials of IoT devices in the waste management industry indicate significant opportunities for savings of at least 35%. Some research has indicated that up to 87% of public bin collections are wasted, due to low fill rates. Incidents of fires in public bins have resulted in the need for one English council to replace two waste collection vehicles at a cost of £500k.

Traditional methods of delivering fundamental services struggle to provide continuous improvement and new ways must be sought. The potential benefits are clear and sizeable.

Solution

IoT Solutions Group has developed an end to end value chain, comprising sensing devices, edge processing and data dissemination.

We are working to combat the inefficiencies experienced across the waste management industry, improve environmental standards and eliminate instances of asset destruction.

Our devices detect the fill rate of bins, if they have been left open, overturned and potential incidents of fire. By tying up with multiple LPWAN solutions we are able to support the technological requirements of any local authority or waste management company and convert data to usable insight in real-time.

FED4SAE Support

With the support of FED4SAE and by working with Digital Catapult and STMicroelectronics our solution is utilising:

• STM32F hardware platform
• LPWAN platform supported by Digital Catapult – deploying SIGFOX and LoRaWAN connectivity

The FED4SAE support has enabled us to accelerate our sensor development and improved the effectiveness of our end to end solutions. The partnership has undoubtedly opened new doors and helped advance our reach into the market.

Impact

Our integrated waste management solutions provide local authorities and waste management operatives with the information they need to streamline collection services, enable emergency response and prevent high value asset write off.

Financial savings and opportunity cost benefits promise to be significant, whilst also enhancing local environments for residents and visitors.

By covering the full value chain, from hardware to insight, and designing bespoke solutions, we are able to provide clients with the insight they need, in the way they need it to address their priorities.

This approach also eliminates end users’ needs to procure the constituent parts of the chain separately, thus driving down the cost to deploy and maintain.

Achievements

Validated 3 communication technologies: Sigfox, LoraWAN and NB IoT.

Demonstrated savings > 50 % related to dynamically optimising bin collection and avoiding full bin events.

Obtained order from the UK’s market leading waste management company.