What you need to know before buying a smart bin.
Smart bins have the ability to improve waste management systems, reduce excess waste, and even increase recycling. But before you take the plunge and purchase a smart bin, you need to know a little more about your options as well as how smart bins work.
A smart bin is a trash can that effectively measures its capacity. It notifies you when it's full, enabling you to empty it before it overflows. It also retains data so that you can analyze overflow times and plan better waste management systems.
Smart bins are ideal for commercial facilities like offices, malls, stadiums, and airports. They can also help at outdoor markets, tourist destinations, and in any public area.
Why do you need a smart bin?
In the past century, cars, houses, communication devices, and home appliances have completely changed. Technology has made them better, safer, and easier to use than ever before.
Do you know what hasn’t changed? Garbage cans.
It’s clear that our current waste management systems aren’t working. Consumption and waste is at an all-time high. Plastic and other non-biodegradable materials pollute our oceans. Recyclables are often contaminated by non-recyclable materials and thus added to landfills.
In these facilities, managing bins can be a time-consuming task. Bins are often emptied before they’re halfway full, which wastes time and effort that could be spent elsewhere.
Think about what it takes to check if a bin is full. For your cleaning staff to check a bin, they might have to walk to the bin and stick their head in the bin, or they’ll simply empty it regardless of whether it’s full or contains very little waste.
Checking the bin might only take a few minutes, but in a large facility, it takes away valuable time spent elsewhere. With a smart bin, your cleaner will receive a notification when the bin is ready. In this way smart waste bins can save your cleaning staff time, reduce waste, and cut back on unnecessary costs.
Smart bins also measure the contents of your bin, allowing you to analyze your recycling efforts and sustainability programs. If you want to improve waste diversion, smart bins will enable you to test and analyze different recycling campaigns and signage in order to find the most effective solution.
What are the benefits of a smart bin?
Smart bins are able to detect their own capacity. This means you’ll be notified before a bin overflows, but it also means that you can track and analyze bin capacity over a certain period of time.
This information can be used to improve your facility’s waste management system, saving time and money. You can use the smart bin’s benefits to create a more eco-friendly, less stressful waste strategy.
Using a smart bin can have the following benefits;
Smart bins save your cleaning team time. Because your cleaning team will be able to see the bin’s capacity, they won’t empty them when they contain very little waste.
Smart bins reduce the wastage of plastic bags by up to 90%. Our projects have shown us that 50%-90% of bins are collected long before they’re full. For an average airport, that means over $30,000 of plastic bags are wasted every single year.
Smart bins help you plan your space better. If you notice that bins seldom get full in one area of your facility, you can reduce the number of bins in that area. The bin can be moved to an area where bins often overflow, or eliminated altogether.
Smart bins help your cleaning team make more effective schedules. By analyzing overflow times, your team can map out the most efficient collection route and schedule.
Smart bins notify you before your bin overflows. Overflowing bins are an eyesore, not to mention a public health hazard.
Smart bins help you analyze environmental awareness campaigns. Facilities typically run different recycling campaigns over the course of the year. The analytics from your smart bins can help you figure out what works and what doesn’t.
There are many brilliant ways to use smart bins to improve your facility and your bottom line. Many of our clients get a great return on investment (see our smart bin ROI calculator here) on smart bins because of these benefits.
How does a smart bin fit into my cleaning team’s schedule?
Let’s say your cleaning staff are scheduled to collect waste at 9am, 1pm, and 5pm every day.
Our software allows you to input your existing collection schedule. Fifteen minutes before the scheduled time, a custom list/report gets sent out to each cleaning staff. Only bins with a certain fill-level (let’s say, 50%, although this can be customized) will be included on the list. As a result, they won’t need to empty bins that contain very little waste.
Will smart bins help with waste diversion?
Many facilities are invested in waste diversion, which is the act of ensuring your garbage doesn’t end up in landfills. To divert waste, as much of it must be recycled as possible.
You might have an audit team come in once a year to analyze your rubbish and score your waste diversion system. This motivates facilities to invest in recycling campaigns and waste-reduction strategies.
However, because this audit only happens once a year, it’s difficult to tell how well your campaigns are working. After all, it’s nearly impossible to analyze what you can’t measure - and measuring recycling is difficult.
That’s where smart bins come in. They can analyze both regular waste bins and recycling bins. Smart recycling bins can tell you whether your campaigns are working. or whether people are simply tossing recyclable materials into the regular bin.
At the end every month, you’ll receive an automated report showing you how much waste and recycling was generated at your site. This estimate will help you see if your programs are working or not. Smartbin.io will track your goals of producing less landfill waste and more recyclables.
Can you turn a normal bin into a smart bin?
Not keen to buy an entirely new bin? That’s okay!
We know many of our clients don’t want to replace a perfectly good trash can with a new one - after all, we’re trying to cut down on waste.
This is where Lidbot comes in. You simply stick Lidbot into any waste or recycling bin and it’ll notify you when the bin is full. You’ll have complete access to an analytics dashboard that will give you valuable data about fill times and more.
Our current waste management systems aren’t working - and it’s time our bins catch up with the rest of technology. Whether you opt for a Smartbin.io receptacle or a Lidbot, investing in smart waste management systems is a great way to ease your facility’s environmental impact while saving you time and money.
