New ways to weigh

Jon Leeds, senior consultant at Carolina Software Inc., a Wilmington, North Carolina-based developer of waste management software, provides several reasons to develop efficient and accurate processes to weigh solid waste.

“The first point is money. When waste comes across the scale and goes into a landfill, aside from taxes, it’s one of the few things that produce income for the municipality,” Leeds says.

The second reason, he says, has to do with regulatory reporting requirements. “A scale is the most accurate way to tell how much of any material has come into or [left] a facility.”

The scale house is where the weighing takes place. It is situated at the entrance to the landfill or disposal facility. Typically, two or more truck scales are installed for customers to use. One scale weighs the loaded vehicle entering the site, and the other captures the weight after unloading.

The scale house administrator subtracts the tare weight, which is the weight of the unloaded vehicle, from the total weight to derive the weight of the waste material disposed at the landfill. Using this figure, the administrator calculates the disposal fee charged to the customer.

The problems operators seem to run into most frequently deal with logistics and the flow of traffic, Leeds says, noting that the problems often have long-running roots.

“Say it’s 1980, and the town decides to start a landfill with one or two scales and one or two lanes. But now, 30 years later, the town has grown, and the demand for the landfill has grown, and the line is so long that traffic backs up to the highway,” he explains.

Gradually, a string of negative repercussions could arise, Leeds says, such as traffic fines, air quality impacts from idling tractors and commuter annoyance at traffic snarls at the landfill entrance, not to mention extended delays for customers.

For situations such as this, Leeds says he would suggest adding a second inbound scale and installing a self-serve kiosk, making it an express lane.

With Carolina Software’s WasteWorks Express system, the driver pulls up and is presented with an interactive screen where he or she can identify themselves and create his or her own input. The system grabs the weight data from the scale and populates that to the screen.

The system operates as the point-of-sale piece in the scale house, Leeds says, and drivers can enter the type of material and the municipality where it originated as well as factor in contract pricing and everything else that goes into creating a billing ticket.

To resolve a throughput issue, he says, the customer could triage traffic flow, directing repeat customers going back and forth to the disposal site multiple times a day to the express lane. With the flow divided, a dedicated express lane could handle redundant traffic such as trash trucks, while casual users could be directed to the normal scale house checkout process.

“If you got 50 percent of your traffic off of your first two lanes and onto this new lane, that’s a huge improvement in throughput,” Leeds says.

Nuances of waste

Rocky Strong, general manager of the Canada-based data automation systems provider Strong Data Automation, says the waste industry has many nuances that can affect how information captured at the scale is used.

“For the more complicated larger clients, we perform a business analysis to determine how to optimize the workflow and how our platforms can make things quicker and better for them,” he says.

Strong says Strong Data Automation’s software can track waste material by weight, volume or quantity depending on client requirements.

While many truck scales come with a software package, he says, Strong Data Automation provides a more feature-rich package that, in addition to weight, can handle data ranging from customer-specific pricing to payroll and staffing.

Strong Data Automation’s customer portal allows users and landfill customers to log on and see their data remotely, permitting residents to view the data produced when they drove over the scale. 

For example, Central Newfoundland Waste Management (CNWM) amalgamated 43 sites into seven transfer sites and one landfill, processing more than 40,000 tons of waste annually. Heavy usage at the sites required streamlining the weigh scale process to avoid excessive wait times.

To make invoicing and managing accounts receivable more accurate and efficient, the company turned to Strong Data Automation to design the data management system for its reconfigured waste management operation.

With software deployed, CNWM is now able to automatically process more than 300 transactions daily with just one person at each of the seven sites.

Radio-frequency identification swipe access at the scales means drivers don’t have to leave their vehicles, enhancing safety and speeding the flow of traffic through the system.

Time spent getting through the weigh scale at the site was reduced to an all-time low, averaging 35 seconds for inbound traffic and 25 seconds for outbound traffic. Wait times and lineups were reduced, even during busy periods, which are easier to predict because the system can track volume trends by hour, day, week and month.

Strong says he views working with customers as a constantly evolving relationship. As long as they’re a partner, customers receive continuous software updates via the cloud server or other secure means, Strong says, noting that his company constantly upgrades its software in response to customer requests.

Visualizing workflow

To alleviate slowdowns at the scale house, Cockeysville, Maryland-based Paradigm Software provides an unattended kiosk based on the requirements of the customer.

“There could be a touch-screen computer or an LCD. It could print a ticket, or it can email a waste billing ticket to the customer,” says Jackie Barlow, chief operating officer for Paradigm Software.

However, Barlow says a lot goes into workflow behind the scenes. With a customer base comprising 86 percent municipal facilities and 14 percent private waste facilities, Paradigm’s service offerings for customers extend beyond providing the kiosk components.

“We take a step back and look at the customer’s workflow to see what they’re currently doing and try to find ways to improve,” Barlow says.

With each client, Paradigm sends out a questionnaire, which creates a picture of the customer’s workflow. With this information to aid decision-making, customers can build default procedures into their operations. Barlow says defaults can become a powerful tool customers can use to smooth the workflow by automating decision-making. 

For instance, he says, administrators can set up defaults that automatically trigger certain processes when customers enter their information at the kiosk. For example, if the customer enters the material type as yard waste, the system automatically can assign that customer’s drop-off to the yard waste pile at the facility; if they enter recyclables, the default automatically could direct the load to the material recycling facility.

“With defaults, we can populate the destination in the facility accurately based on the material,” Barlow says. “With our application, each facility can be configured differently. A lot of configurations go on during setup that keep the scale operators from making inadvertent errors in the processing of transactions.”

Staying safe

Municipalities that transport solid waste should consider the risks of driving overloaded, says an integration specialist for Air-Weigh, a Eugene, Oregon-based manufacturer of onboard weighing systems for trucks.

“Driving overloaded can lead to costly wear on a vehicle and even contribute to accidents by altering handling characteristics and braking distances,” he says.

To address this concern, Air-Weigh manufactures an onboard weighing system called LoadMaxx that integrates with built-in vehicle diagnostics and can be configured to interface with a Geotab Cloud-based portal. LoadMaxx load cells are suspension mounted, either as original equipment or as retrofit components. The system provides a real-time readout of the load weight, giving drivers in the cab the ability to make informed decisions about when to stop loading and head to the disposal site.

“If the driver has to wait until he gets to the landfill scale to find out he’s been driving overloaded, it’s already too late,” the Air-Weigh specialist explains. With ongoing advances in telematics, he says, “weight is just another way to monitor this very expensive piece of equipment.”

This article originally appeared in April 2022 MSW Management, which Waste Today acquired in 2023. To read the full article, visit https://tinyurl.com/mpbr2fcp.