My recent article, entitled ‘Together, we are stronger’, which featured in last month’s issue of LARAC OnLine, was met with positive feedback. Not only from fellow manufacturers and providers of waste solutions, but also from customers who have been hugely complimentary about Egbert Taylor Group’s new approach to the industry.
And it’s these conversations that have led me to prepare this article; an article that, similar to the last piece, also touches on evolution however in this case not from the perspective of the supplier but from that of the customer.
Whilst there are companies such as Egbert Taylor Group that continue to innovate and develop new solutions that create efficiencies for those that adopt them, on the other side of the fence sit organisations that recognise their own need to evolve. After all, there’s nothing like the pressure of meeting increased targets in tandem with decreasing budgets to help sharpen focus.
Through this article I would like to take the opportunity to recognise those who have readily embraced this and, as a result, become trailblazers in their own right.
Take Brighton & Hove City Council, for instance, who we have just worked with to develop an ITN Productions film covering the importance of new approaches to waste collection in making local authorities’ budgets work harder. The council has rolled out a number of solutions, many of which I’m pleased to say are from Egbert Taylor Group, that have transformed its approach to waste collection.
One of those is Bigbelly, which uses solar power compaction technology to increase capacity up to 808 litres when full and gathers, consolidates and analyses data from each of its smart collection stations to generate real-time fleet status, alerts and reports. This in turn has enabled the council to generate a concise, up-to-the-minute view of its entire waste and recycling footprint.
Rather than Brighton & Hove City Council collection teams blindly emptying partially full bins, which uses valuable resource, they have become more responsive as a result of having the ‘intelligence’ to help them decide when to collect individual bins and establish the most efficient collection route to take. With a Bigbelly smart station, when it’s full and ready to be emptied, it simply lets the council’s team know via their mobile device or computer.
The council is also embarking on a trial of our other technology brand, SmartBin, which will see the integration of ultrasonic fill-level sensor monitoring technology across a sample of their existing bin fleet, many of which are Taylor’s 1100 litre containers. By ‘upgrading’ the bins, they too can provide real-time reports on fullness levels and facilitate dynamic route mapping. Councils in London and Shipley have also recognised the value that these approaches add to the process of waste collection and, as a result, have adopted similar strategies.
This evolutionary process is cyclical. The customer creates demand for new products and the supplier develops solutions that enable customers to not only do things differently, but also to think differently. Judging by the rate at which this process is happening, with council’s such as Brighton spearheading change, the waste collection industry will no doubt be unrecognisable in as little as a decade from now and I’m delighted that Egbert Taylor Group is playing a significant role in this change.
