Mölndal: energising municipal waste collection with IoT technology

Project fiche

Client

Municipality of Mölndal

Type

Public

Sector

Waste collection

Geography

Mölndal, Sweden

Description

The municipality of Mölndal, Sweden, has 69,364 inhabitants and manages its waste collection services with municipal trucks and personnel. Mölndal seeks to optimise waste collection in the most optimal and environmentally friendly way, and has deployed an IoT solution consisting of 300 miniQ filling sensors with LoRaWAN communications.

The project

CLIENT CHALLENGE

Mölndal aims to reduce the amount of waste and to this end is implementing a recycling plan. To monitor compliance with this objective, it is extremely important for the city to have up-to-date data on waste generation in order to determine the effectiveness of its policies and awareness-raising campaigns.

In addition, the municipality seeks to optimize waste collection in the most environmentally friendly way.

For these reasons, a study was carried out to assess the volume of waste produced and the opportunities for improvement of the service that could be achieved by introducing IoT technology.

At the time of the study, the collection frequency is fixed and is organized according to areas and type of waste.

To achieve the efficiency gains that would result from changing the static collection system to a dynamic or on-demand system, the municipality decided to work with Wellness TechGroup, an IoT company that will be responsible for the implementation and exploitation of the results.

SCOPE & SOLUTION

To start the project, the municipality of Mölndal deployed an IoT solution consisting of 300 miniQ filling sensors with LoRaWAN communications. The network that will cover the sensors is contracted to Mölndal Energy, the municipality's energy distribution company.

The solution also includes a software platform where the data obtained from these devices is collected and analyzed.

This solution is Quamtra Smart Waste Management, developed end to end by Wellness TechGroup.

The containers included in the study are for glass collection and have the following capacities: 2500L & 900L.

The project was divided into two phases:

  • Deployment: in April and May 2020, the monitoring devices will be deployed inside the containers.
  • Monitoring: next, the sensors are registered on the platform, locating their position on the city map and a detailed analysis of the data is performed.
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AUDIT RESULTS

The containers with efficient collection should have an average level of around 40% - 50%; however, we found a significant number of containers that fell below the optimum level, as well as many that exceeded the optimum level.

From this analysis, it can be concluded that there are many containers that are collected below the optimum value, as well as many containers that have a higher value, which indicates a significant risk of overflow.

20% of containers have an average fill level below 30%, indicating inefficient collection.

17% of containers are at risk of overflowing because the average fill level exceeds 80%.

36% of containers are collected efficiently as they have an average fill level of around 40% - 50%.

CONCLUSIONS

The audit carried out with Wellness TechGroup's technology has shown that there is significant room for improvement in Mölndal's waste collection.

Some of the containers have gone from being collected at around 55% to 85%. Providing information on the fill level has enabled alerts for the collection team, preventing overflows before they occur.

The implementation of on-demand collection, based on the values reported by the containers, led to a reduction of up to 50% in collection tasks for some containers.

The collection schedules have been adjusted to adapt the number of collections and the dates on which they are carried out based on the filling level. As a result, operations were optimized: the amount of waste remained unchanged with respect to the collection phase with static collection.