An overwhelming majority of councils throughout the UK operate a paid-for garden waste collection service. One of these is Monmouthshire Council, which has long since operated such a service but has increasingly found that managing permits was both cumbersome and expensive.
Now, the council has partnered with waste technology specialists MOBA to trial a new service that dispenses with paper permits and, instead, enables its waste vehicles to immediately identify which customers bins have been paid for, and those that have not.
‘At the end of 2019, we decided to move away from the bags in favour of a simpler, more environmentally friendly, and more cost- effective service,’ explains Senior Collections Officer for Monmouthshire Council, Dewi Lane. ‘The permits were an issue, and they cost us a considerable amount of money – up to £30,000 a year to print and post them to customers. They were not very sustainable either, so we decided to swap to a wheeled bin service.’
A technology solution was needed to enable the council to achieve this and so went to the market in 2020 in search of willing partners to take on the challenge. ‘We ultimately chose MOBA because they offered a simple, straightforward process for managing the bins’ says Dewi. ‘The price was very reasonable, and they were all singing from the right hymn sheet.’
In addition to a paperless service, Dewi says that there will also be considerable cost savings. Previously, permits were printed and posted out to each resident, which would have cost the council £300,000 over a decade. ‘The MOBA system will cost us a little bit more money in the first year, but it will save us a great deal over the lifetime of the bins’.
MOBA has now implemented its RFID systems on two of the council’s collection vehicles so far, with a further four vehicles being added over the next year. Each bin is also chipped so that once the bin is presented to the vehicle, readers on both sides of the lifters will independently check each bin to ensure its valid before it is emptied, without any hold-ups or loss of time. If the readers identify any issues with the bin, it will stop the lifter and flash the crew’s red light. The staff will know that the bin has been blocked for some reason and the team will return the bin to the curbside. Council management can then investigate reasons why it has not been emptied; with the likelihood being that the customer no longer has a valid subscription.
This system now ensures that only paying customers’ bins are collected. Once a customer stops paying for the service, their bin goes on the blacklist, and this is then communicated to all vehicles. Should a blacklisted bin be picked up, the override system will prevent it from being emptied. Customers will be moved back onto the green list when they renew their subscriptions at the start of the new season.
According to Dewi, “If a customer reports that their bin has not been collected, Monmouthshire can double-check that the subscription has been paid for and if the customer is on the correct list. This enables the service to be run more effectively and efficiently, creating cost savings for the council.”
‘We are still very much in the inception phase of this project. Our garden waste service operates on an annual subscription model from February to November. At the end of November, when we stop garden waste collection, we will blacklist all the microchips in customers’ bins. Next year, around February, when we start collecting again, we will start to greenlight those chips as and when people register for the service.’
MOBA’s Managing Director, Stuart Sargeant, explains that moving customers on and off the list is easily managed through the RFID system, with the added benefit of providing real-time and collection data to Dewi and his team.
‘The team can run reports from the system to see what has been collected, and queries can be resolved by checking a customer’s current status. For example, if a customer reports that their bin has not been collected, Monmouthshire can double-check that the subscription has been paid for and if the customer is on the correct list. This enables the service to be run more effectively and efficiently, creating cost savings for the council.’
The system will come into full operation in March 2022, once Monmouthshire’s vehicle replacement programme is complete.
Dewi explains: ‘When we re-start the service in early 2022, the chips will become necessary. Our crews in Caldicot have already got the readers on their vehicles and they have been carrying out the garden waste bin collection since March 2021. The Abergavenny and Monmouth crews receive their new vehicles in September, and MOBA will include the RIFD reading equipment then’.
‘MOBA worked very hard to get the microchips ready and to get the system up and running for us. They couldn’t have done any more. I think they have been excellent.’
