Changes Coming in Onboard Scales and Collection SoftwarePerformance, longevity, accuracy, and the ability to collect, handle and analyze the staggering amount of data are key issues for commercial haulers. BY DAN RAFTER

Roger Edberg had an important

mission in 2010. He’d just

taken over as senior superin-

tendent of the ground services

department at University of California,

Santa Cruz (UCSC), and one of his goals

was to divert as much campus waste as

possible from landfills.

Like many college campuses—and

municipalities—UCSC is working to boost

its recycling and composting efforts and

reduce the amount of waste it sends each

day to area landfills.

To help the university meets its new and

loftier diversion goals, Edberg needed more

information about the waste that the univer-

sity’s collection vehicles were collecting and

hauling. He needed data to tell him exactly

how much waste the university’s collection

vehicles were already trucking to landfills.

That’s where onboard collection soft-

ware—in this case, the LoadMan LM400

load management software from LoadMan,

a division of Creative Microsystems—came

in. The university has been piloting this

collection software since 2014. The Load-

Man software gives drivers the ability to

track load weights, load locations, the type

of products that they are hauling, and the

most efficient routes to complete their

pickups and dropoffs.

But what Edberg truly appreciates is

that the onboard software allows drivers to

instantly calculate the weight of a particular

load. This is important: In the past, drivers

for the university were only tracking their

collections by volume. This means that

the university would often undercharge

customers when they were picking up par-

ticularly heavy loads.

And that resulted in lost revenue for the

university during a time when every dollar

is of critical importance.

As Edberg puts it: “We’d charge the same

amount of money for a dumpster filled

with balloons as we would for one filled

with bricks.”

Today? Drivers at the university are

able to track whether a pick-up is heavier

than usual. The university can then charge

accordingly, helping to keep its bottom line

a healthy one.

“By charging by weight instead of by vol-

ume, we more accurately take into account

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do

[ www.mswmanagement.com ] MSW MANAGEMENT 67

68 MSW MANAGEMENT [ SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015 ]

our costs,” says Edberg. “We can then charge

our customers correctly for the amount of

work we are doing. That has been such an

important change.”

Not a RarityEdberg is not the only solid waste profes-

sional realizing the benefits of onboard

scale and collection software. These twin

technologies can help solid waste drivers

immediately determine when their trucks

are reaching their maximum-allowable

weights. They can help them chart how

much a particular load weighs, so that they

won’t accidentally damage their trucks by

lifting a dumpster that is too heavy.

With onboard scales and collection

software, municipalities can make sure

that they are not undercharging—or

overcharging—the customers along their

routes. And, perhaps most importantly,

this technology helps drivers chart the

most efficient routes to and from collection

points, transfer stations, and landfills.

This information can reduce the

expenses of municipal solid waste districts.

Trucks that don’t travel too far, and don’t

haul loads that are too heavy, will require

less maintenance and fewer repairs. They’ll

consume less fuel. And that all adds up to a

more financially stable solid waste district.

These economic benefits are the reason

why so many municipalities are turning

to onboard collection software and scales

today, say the professionals working in this

industry.

Tricia Baker, marketing manager with

Eugene, OR-based Air-Weigh, says that her

company has long been passionate about

on-board scales.

But what’s good today is that Baker

and her peers at Air-Weigh are far from

alone: She says that a growing number of

municipal solid waste (MSW) officials are

now focused on providing their drivers

with the technology they need to calculate

the weights of their loads and run more

efficient routes based on the amount of

waste their vehicles are already carrying.

This is a trend that Baker says is good

for the industry, one that illustrates how

the MSW industry is becoming a more

mature one. The professionals oversee-

ing waste collection are more comfortable

with technology, and understand the cost

savings that scales and collection software

can provide.

“A lot of companies have been using

onboard scales for a long time. But we

are seeing a big change with solid waste

officials and managers talking about

weight in general,” says Baker. “Before, they

turned to onboard scales after something

went wrong. They wanted to use the scales

to make sure it wouldn’t happen again.

Now they are more proactive than they

have been in the past. They are now using

onboard scales to be more efficient.”

Air-Weigh offers two types of onboard

scales that municipalities can use to run

their fleets more efficiently.

The BinMaxx onboard scale tells truck

operators how much a particular gar-

bage bin weighs. This product, designed

mostly for front loaders, gives operators

the information they need to avoid pick-

ing up a bin so heavy that it will damage

their front-loaders. They can also use the

information provided by BinMaxx to make

sure that they don’t over- or undercharge

their customers.

“A bin that is full of engine blocks every

week should come with a higher charge than

one that is filled with cardboard,” says Baker.

Air-Weigh also offers LoadMaxx, which

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provides an overall weight of a truck at any given time. Baker says

that customers install this product for safety reasons. If a waste

vehicle is overweight, it can’t stop as quickly as it needs to.

“If it gets into a wreck and can’t stop, that is bad press if an

overweight vehicle is the cause,” she says. “Companies and munici-

palities don’t want that kind of press. By operating a truck at the

proper weight, they can avoid this potential problem.”

LoadMaxx can help reduce the maintenance costs on a waste

truck, too, Baker says. When operators drive their vehicles when

they weigh too much, it can cause unnecessary wear and tear on

them. If drivers are alerted by an on-board scale that they are driv-

ing a truck that is carrying too much waste, they can head back to a

landfill or transfer station to empty their load.

The reduced wear-and-tear pays off over the long run in the form

of lower maintenance costs and fewer big repair bills, Baker says.

Onboard scales can even provide good public relations for

municipalities, whether they use an outside contractor to pick up

their waste or whether they run their own fleet of vehicles. Over-

weight waste vehicles can severely damage streets, dotting them

with potholes and cracks, something that won’t make municipal

officials or residents who have to drive these streets happy.

But when operators drive trucks that meet a municipality’s

suggested weight limits? They are doing their part to protect that

municipality’s roads.

“Companies are proud to use these scales,” she says. “If you are

not running overweight trucks around your neighborhoods, you

are being a good citizen of the cities that you are serving. You are

protecting their roads and infrastructure.”

Diversion in Santa CruzFor a good example of how onboard scales and collection software

can benefit users, look toward California.

At the UCSC grounds, service officials study the data that their

trucks’ onboard software provides to determine if they need to

change drivers’ routes and if they are doing enough to divert waste

from landfills. They also study the data to make sure that they are

charging the proper fees for every customer, upping their fees appro-

priately for those clients with consistently heavier pick-ups.

“We now have a real-time knowledge of what is going on,” says

Edberg. “We can now understand the flow of material and how we

are managing it. It is great for our budgeting.”

The data stream from the onboard collection software is playing

a big role in the university’s efforts to boost the amount of waste it

recycles, Edberg says. That’s because grounds services officials can

now break down the weight of the waste materials that their drivers

are trucking to landfills from different sectors of the campus.

Edberg might discover that one part of campus is responsible for

the most waste month after month. Armed with this information,

the grounds services department can take actions to help the build-

ings and clients at this part of campus reduce the amount of waste

they generate.

“It helps us track down which sectors are diverting well, and

which need help,” says Edberg.

Edberg says that he would recommend onboard collection

software for any large-scale solid-waste operator. He says that the

university is now saving significant money by charging their custom-

ers according to weight instead of volume.

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72 MSW MANAGEMENT [ SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015 ]

And that’s something that never would have happened without

the benefit of collection software.

“We had always been estimating volumes when it came to collect-

ing waste,” says Edberg. “I thought that there had to be something

better out there. It seemed crazy that we couldn’t bill by weight

instead of volume. It didn’t seem realistic. Our software does every-

thing we want it to do. It does automated weighing, and it gives us a

centralized collection of data through the cloud.”

Alan Housley, vice president of marketing and product manage-

ment with Renton, WA-based Creative Microsystems, provider of

LoadMan onboard collection software, says that waste and recycling

professionals are evolving. Municipalities are demanding that waste

collection supervisors use technology to analyze their routes. The

goal is to reduce the costs of collecting waste.

At the same time, municipalities are increasingly setting new recy-

cling goals. They want their waste collection trucks traveling more

often to recycling centers than to landfills. This, too, is increasing the

demand for onboard scales and software, Housley says.

But the biggest change hitting the industry today? Housley says

that it’s coming from the customers of waste haulers. These custom-

ers, including municipalities that outsource their garbage collection

services, are demanding that haulers provide them with data showing

how much waste they’ve sent to landfills, and how much they’ve

diverted to recycling centers.

“There is a sea change going on in this industry right now,” says

Housley.

And onboard scales and collection software are at the forefront of

this change, he says, providing the numbers that so many customers

are now demanding from their haulers.

The MSW market is one of the leaders of this trend, Housley

states. And that’s because municipalities are placing a bigger empha-

sis on sustainability efforts.

“There was a time when city councils would request a sustainabil-

ity report from municipal departments once a year. It would sit there

and gather dust,” says Housley. “That has changed. Now they are

living, breathing documents that drive what municipalities are doing

to protect the environment.”

Municipalities that contract with outside haulers are increasingly

demanding that the companies they hire to collect their solid waste pro-

vide detailed data on how much of this waste they divert from landfills.

The goals of many of these communities is to significantly lower the

amount of waste that they send to landfills and increase the amount

they send to recycling stations and compost centers. Without onboard

software that charts how much waste trucks collect and where they bring

it, it’s difficult to determine whether haulers are meeting the diversion

goals set by the municipalities that hire them.

“The problem has always been that there are too many people in the

process,” says Housley. “You have a trucker with route sheets who has to

write down weights. That trucker turns the route sheets into administra-

tors who may or may not be there. Where did the paper end up? The

information on it has to be loaded into the computer by someone else.

“The hauler also has to get the landfill tickets. They might get

lost along the way. There is where you run into an integrity issue.

You may have accurate data on weight, but when you get to the total

weight, do you have the integrity of data? There are so many people

handling the papers.”

The waste-hauling industry today is moving quickly toward auto-

mating this collection and diversion data.

Housley says that the onboard collection software provided by his

company tracks 17 different types of information about every load

that haulers pick up.

“The entire process starts first with highly accurate scales and

ends with in-depth analysis of the data,” he adds.

Will the drivers of trucks, though, be able to adjust to the chang-

ing technology in their vehicles? Housley says that they will, as long

as their managers support them and offer the training that they need.

“If the drivers are trained they have no trouble at all,” he says.

“But if they are not trained properly, that is when they will have

challenges. People don’t like things that they don’t understand. As

soon as they understand it, the drivers love it.”

The key is for onboard collection software to be easy to use,

Housley says. The best systems will provide a touchscreen display

that differs little from drivers are used to from their iPads and smart-

phones. Drives merely have to touch the screen to tell the system

that they are picking up a scheduled load at a specific location. That

enters the necessary data into the system.

And that should be all that’s required of drivers whose collection

trucks are equipped with onboard collection software.

“That’s it,” says Housley. “It’s when they have to go through

screen after screen of information to get what they want. They’re not

trained for that. You need a very simple interface. When you have

that, drivers will adjust to the systems easily.”

The Most Efficient ScenarioOnboard scales and collection software, while productive tools for

MSW districts, are still not perfect, especially the onboard scale part

of the package. Steve Graham, vehicle segment manager with the

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Columbus, OH, office of Mettler Toledo, says

that onboard scales can lose their proper

calibration as waste trucks travel more miles.

Because of this, municipalities shouldn’t

rely solely on onboard scales to determine

how much solid waste their trucks are car-

rying. These scales are good tools to help

operators more efficiently plan their routes.

But drivers and municipalities shouldn’t be

surprised if the weights they provide are

sometimes not completely accurate.

Municipalities can more accurately

measure the amount of waste trucks are

hauling when these vehicles drive over

static scales built into the ground when

they are entering or leaving landfills or

transfer stations. These are the type of

scales in which Mettler Toledo specializes.

“We do see more municipalities using

onboard scales, and they are useful prod-

ucts,” says Graham. “There are definite

benefits to using them. They help drivers

plan out their routes. They help drivers

make sure they are getting their trucks as

full as possible—without going over weight

limits—as they head to a landfill or transfer

station. But the weights they provide are

not as accurate as what you get with a static

scale built into the ground.”

This is why Graham says that the most

forward-thinking of municipalities rely on

a combination of static in-ground scales

and onboard scales and collection software

to collect waste in the most cost-efficient

way possible.

“That way, drivers can get weight mea-

surements as they’re driving around,” says

Graham. “They can see that they are at 90%

of their trucks’ allowable weight. They then

know that they can hit one or two more

pick-ups before they have to head back to

the landfill or transfer station.”

And when those drivers are back at the

transfer station or landfill? They can drive

over an in-ground static scale to generate

the most accurate measures of the waste

that they are carrying.

Graham says that it’s good business

sense for municipalities to care about

accuracy. Those municipalities that aren’t

relying on the most accurate of scales

might end up with lost revenue because

they are not charging their customers

enough for the waste pickups they

provide them.

When selling their scales, officials

with Mettler Toledo focus on how the

accuracy of their static scales can help

municipalities earn the fairest prices for

the waste collection services they provide.

Municipalities should be compensated for

the correct amount of waste they collect.

Accurate scales make sure that they do not

accidentally short-change themselves by

undercharging their customers.

“We are trying to push the accuracy

message to our customer base,” says

Graham. “It is a bit of a tradeoff with the

price. Our line of static scales is priced

higher than some of our competitors.’ It’s

a premium brand. So we want to make

sure that our customers understand our

accuracy message. We seem to get the sale

once we explain to them how better accu-

racy can impact their bottom lines.” MSW

Dan Rafter is a technical writer and frequent

contributor.

For related articles: www.mswmanagement.com

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