Asset tracking: Luxury or necessity?

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Technology continues to advance across all business sectors, and the waste industry is no exception.

Asset tracking technology, a catchall term for a broad range of services that provide haulers and municipalities key insights into their assets, has gained popularity in recent years. For waste management providers, tracking assets such as collection carts and commercial containers can help provide efficient and accurate service.

Mike Marchetti, chief technology officer at Wastequip, says asset tracking plays an important role in multiple industries but can be particularly valuable for the waste and recycling industry.

“It provides companies with visibility into where their assets are deployed, who has their assets, the maintenance history of those assets and their warranty status,” Marchetti says.

Wastequip, headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, supplies Wasteware asset-tracking technology.

Asset tracking typically includes a multitude of services but is most commonly used by firms to locate misplaced or stolen carts and containers. The technology also can provide haulers and municipalities with data on carts that are active in the field, current inventory, reorder points and route optimization.

Paul Bischof, head of product management for Samsara’s Smart Trailers and Connected Equipment teams, says asset tracking can monitor collection bins for service verification reporting.

Samsara, a San Francisco-based technology firm, has a portfolio of management technologies for unpowered and powered assets.

Bischof says sensors also can be used to monitor the weight or amount of material in a container, indicating when service is needed.

“The sensor component is going to be another minority aspect of these devices,” he says. “In that case, it’s more about an event. It’s not about location.”

How the technology works

Asset tracking technology often uses printed scannable bar codes, quick-response (QR) codes or embedded radio frequency identification (RFID) tags to monitor carts and containers.

“Bar codes, QR codes and RFID are all slightly different but used for the same thing,” Marchetti says. “At their root, they contain encoded data. It can be as simple as a serial number or as complex as containing the item number, color, size or other information.”

He explains that RFID has advantages for the waste industry compared with bar codes and QR codes. Because of the nature of printed scannable codes, they often are used as temporary identifiers because they can wear away over time, making them unreadable. RFID is more protected and has the ability to last for years or even decades, making it a more permanent solution.

“[RFID] can also be scanned just by being in the range of [the container] and can be bulk scanned,” Marchetti adds.

Landon Hutchinson, sales and field services manager at Grand Rapids, Michigan-based Cascade Cart Solutions, says every cart made by Cascade has an RFID tag embedded into the top rim.

“These are scanned into our proprietary program, and that information provides a lot to the customer,” he says of Cascade’s CartLogic software, a web-based, cloud-managed software solution for tracking, maintaining and reporting on waste, recycling and organics cart fleets. “With that scan, we can provide a serial number, we can provide the RFID signature, we can provide a specific latitude and longitude, [and] we can offer the physical address location of that cart.”

Hutchinson says CartLogic operates through a scanner that the user attaches to a cellphone.

Other forms of asset tracking often use cloud-based software accessible through a mobile app.

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The benefits of asset tracking

Cost savings associated with asset tracking typically come down to haulers’ and municipalities’ understanding of the containers they have inventoried and their locations.

“There’s a significant amount of money placed into the overall cost of carting a community,” Hutchinson says. “The largest cost-saving ability is knowing what inventory you have. It’s keeping inventory at a manageable level [and] not overextending yourself on total capital spend on new assets.”

Using this technology, municipalities can minimize hauling costs by paying only for assets that are in the field and actively being serviced, Marchetti explains. Conversely, haulers can prove to the municipalities they serve that they are completing service requirements.

Asset tracking also can improve the customer service experience. If a customer calls a hauler regarding a cart at a residence, service representatives can use asset tracking technology to determine what assets a customer has, as well as identify any past or missed services, Marchetti says.

Hutchinson says having direct access to single-cart information also could save travel time for haulers and municipalities. Rather than relying on the customer to relay cart information, servicers can arrive at a residence with the information needed by searching the name or code associated with that cart in their own database.

Sensors that determine when a bin is full can play a role in decreasing travel time, as well, since haulers only make necessary trips. 

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Encouraging adoption

In the past, some haulers viewed asset tracking as an unnecessary and costly purchase, but views on the technology are changing.

Bischof says some haulers and municipalities remain hesitant to adopt asset tracking because they are wary of digitization. Transferring processes that traditionally have been done on paper to a digital system can take time.

“I think about industries and their digital transformation journeys, … [and] it takes a while,” Bischof says. “There are a lot of industries today that have built robust processes [based] on paper, on repetition [and] on refining themselves to a certain workflow.

“But what they find is there’s this real value when you start to go on that [digitization] journey. You start to get more visibility of all the inefficiencies in the things you didn’t know about that you probably should have,” he adds.

Hutchinson and Marchetti agree that customers want an easy-to-use solution for asset tracking.

Additionally, in the past, asset tracking technology had too many moving parts, leading to higher costs, Hutchinson says.

Asset tracking initially gained popularity among municipalities looking to compensate for less advanced technologies when compared with private companies that can be quicker to adopt industry innovations, Hutchinson explains. Through word of mouth between municipalities, the use of asset tracking has spread, but the burden of encouraging adoption ultimately falls on the manufacturer.

“It’s important for us to work in partnership with a municipality or hauler to show them the ROI [return on investment] the software provides,” Marchetti says.

Asset tracking, as with most technological innovations, was created to make work easier. As more haulers and municipalities adopt asset tracking systems and overall accessibility increases, the technology could become a necessity rather than a luxury.

“[Asset tracking] has already taken off, but it’s going to be the norm rather than the exception across the country,” Hutchinson says.

The author is the digital editor for the Recycling Today Media Group and can be reached at tkazdin@gie.net.