Majadahonda: ICT solution to take a key step in the Sustainability strategy

Project fiche

Client

Majadahonda Municipality

Type

Public

Sector

Waste collection

Geography

Majadahonda, Madrid (Spain)

Description

In line with its Sustainability strategy, the Majadahonda town hall set out to study the true impact of an ICT solution on the city’s cleaning and waste collection service.

The project

CLIENT CHALLENGE

Majadahonda is a municipality belonging to the Community of Madrid. The municipality has already embarked on the path towards Sustainability by launching optimization initiatives for its cleaning and waste collection services. Majadahonda covers waste management for a population of more than 70,000 inhabitants, providing collection services for a total of nearly 2,000 plastic, glass, paper/cardboard and organic waste containers.

At the time the study was carried out, the city council had contracted collection services with the current concessionaire and had established the collection frequency for each type of waste.

In order to assess the established collection frequency and how well it responded to citizen use, the council planned to analyze filling level trends in containers. By doing so, they could use precise data to determine the true optimal collection frequency and reflect their findings in the new concession.

The goal is to obtain highly valuable information that will serve to improve collection service specifications, ensuring they adapt to the needs of Majadahonda residents.

SOLUTION

The city placed filling-level sensors inside the containers for different kinds of waste and a software platform is deployed to analyze and display the collected data. This solution is Quamtra Smart Waste Management, developed entirely by Wellness TechGroup.

Four routes have been taken into account for this project: 2 plastic routes and 2 paper routes.

The city council and the current concession company agree on the implementation of a collection model based on container filling level. The collection operation effectively changes from a static collection operation to an on-demand collection.

RESULTS

Total reduction in the number of collections of 36% (267 by 417)

32% less frequent collection of plastic
38% less frequent collections of paper

Average fill level of containers increased by 27%

18% increase in average filling-level of plastic containers
34% increase in average filling-level of paper containers

Increase in filling-level at time of collection, from 56.25% to 76.5%

15% increase in filling-level of plastic containers at time of collection
24% increase in filling-level of paper containers at time of collection

BENEFITS

The sensorization in the containers allows the on demand collection to optimize waste management tasks.

Thanks to the sensors, the city can proactively respond to increases in demand for the service while ensuring the quality of street collection and cleaning and preventing overflows.

Eventually, the amount of waste collected at the end of the process is the same, but fewer resources have been used: fewer hours of human resources, fewer hours of a collection truck, fewer hours of collection service in the streets that can cause traffic jams, noise, emissions, pollution and, ultimately, inconvenience to citizens. Quality service is provided with less use of resources.