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The city’s trash collection is going digital.
Abraham Chaparro, solid waste and facilities director, and his staff members told the Roswell City Council’s Infrastructure Committee on Monday about an ongoing project to use GPS and GIS technology to make trash routes more efficient and possibly extend the life of landfill cells.
“Currently the solid waste routes are really based on driver memory alone,” Jason Flores, automation supervisor, said. “This provides challenges and creates inconsistency on the routes.”
Over the last four months, the staff has been digitizing the routes in the first phase of the project. Drivers will use an app on a tablet or phone to see the route as plotted by GIS software.
“We’re taking their memory and putting it on a tablet,” Flores said.
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That meant mapping the more than 10,000 container locations throughout the city, said Sonja Jamilla, chief innovation officer with Souder, Miller and Associates, a contracted consultant for the city.
That data was mapped using GPS and GIS equipment the department already had, she said.
“These models are built into that software and that’s what we’re leveraging,” Jamilla said.
“Obviously you want to maximize the pickup by reducing the time and minimize trucks from visiting a road too many times. They are doing that right now and really just throwing all this information to a mathematical model. Our focus was on efficiency and reducing redundancy,” she said.
Information such as speed limits, locations of one-way streets, if the trash containers are in an alley or on the street, and whether or not turns are allowed also figure into the models.
The GIS software uses the data to map the most efficient routes, but human input will still be used.
“We’re also leaning on some of the drivers’ experience. The computer only knows so much,” Jamilla said.
The Solid Waste Office will be a sort of mission control for the digital routes. Flores will be able to monitor the progress of trucks along routes and make adjustments as needed.
“We are actually looking at doing holiday schedules, weather schedules. So when we have storms, rain, accidents, Jason, from his desk, will be able to reroute the routes based on what’s going on. He’ll be able to make those adjustments from his desk and push it right to the drivers,” Chaparro said.
The GIS-mapped routes should help reduce mileage on the trucks as well as fuel consumption, Flores and Jamilla said. It will also help when a new driver comes onto a route.
Currently, training a new driver on a route takes several weeks, Chaparro said. Under the new system, new drivers will just have to learn to use the tablet or phone app.
“They just follow it like you would a Google map,” he said.
That will also be helpful if a driver has to leave a route in mid-shift, he said.
“The good thing about this system is that it will be able to push the routes and save. Say you have a driver doing 50% of the route and he or she has to go home and you have to have someone else come in. Jason will be able to push the route to exactly where he stopped and where the route will pick up again,” Chaparro said.
Chaparro and Debbie Reyer, senior administrator, have also completed training to make adjustments to the routes, Chaparro said.
The office will also know when containers on a route have emptied, which should help with customer service, Jamilla said. If a customer calls to say their trash has not been picked up, for example, the staff will be able to check and see if the truck has already been by the location.
The next phase of the project will be fine-tuning the monitoring dashboard. A beta-test phase will be used before the system is completely rolled out.
The solid waste department is also using GPS technology to monitor compaction rates in the landfill, which Chaparro said has helped extend the life of the nearly full cell 4.
In February, a topographical survey by Souder, Miller and Associates estimated the cell would reach capacity in July. The city expedited construction of a new cell, obtaining a loan from the New Mexico Finance Authority of $4.5 million for the construction of the $3.3 million, 20-acre cell 5A and $1.2 million for a new compactor.
Chaparro said the cell construction was expected to be complete by July 15, but the 100-year rain event at the end of May delayed the work. The completion date is now Oct. 27.
Landfill Supervisor Fernando Valdez said the purchase of a Caterpillar 836K compactor last year made a difference in expanding the use of cell 4, along with a GPS monitoring system on the compactor and a Caterpillar scraper. Those two pieces of equipment are constantly running on the landfill, he said.
The GPS system monitors the level of compaction of the trash in the cell. Displays on the equipment and in the office show where on the cell’s surface the equipment has been. Different colors show the level of compaction, with green showing the maximum level of compaction, Valdez said.
The software can also create topographical and elevation views of the cell.
The expected lifespan of a cell 5 is 10 years, Valdez said, but other landfills that use the same system have been able to extend the use of a landfill by five years, he said.
City/RISD reporter Juno Ogle can be reached at 575-622-7710, ext. 205, or reporter04@rdrnews.com.
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City using technology to improve trash routes, expand landfill cell use - Roswell Daily Record
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