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A few years ago, the SSI Schaefer system, the waste management container subsidiary of the American Schaefer Group, launched a system based onRFIDThe Wireless ID Scanning, Tracking and Recovery (WISTAR) system helps users more easily track garbage trucks delivered to their homes or offices. The WISTAR system embeds RFID tags on Schaefer waste bins and provides customers with a web portal for RFID asset information connection and management. The system was jointly developed by SeedSpark and the company, which provides RFID technology and cloud software for managing data.
Since then, more than 2.5 million Schaefer-tagged garbage trucks have been put into service in the U.S. and Canada. Now, customers are looking for ways to extend the program’s capabilities, such as automatically determining the most efficient path for garbage trucks to move.
(SSI Schaefer embeds an UHF RFID tag in the left handle of each garbage truck. After the company receives an order for garbage trucks marked with a specific number of RFID tags from a city, the company will write the city name, date and other related information into the memory of each garbage truck tag.)
The first pilot deployment took place in Las Vegas in 2007, said Maria Frizzell, vice president of sales and operations for Schaefer’s waste technology division. Since then, the full version of WISTAR with hosted software has been deployed in 7 major cities including Dallas, Texas, Tampa, Hillsboro, and St. Petersburg, with a total of 550,000 garbage trucks marked with RFID tags.
Customers in various cities are starting to tweak the system to do more. “Customers need more precise search capabilities and tools to manage their day-to-day work,” Frizzell said. These capabilities include identifying items that are received on a daily basis and identifying more efficient paths of movement.
Chad Jenkins, president and CEO of SeedSpark, said the difficulty with RFID technology is how to read and view data with or without the Internet. Finally, the tag data is written and stored within the server.
In the WISTAR system, Jenkins explained, the left handle of each garbage truck is embedded with a SeedSpark UHF RFID tag with a built-in Alien Higgs4 chip.
When the garbage truck is made, the tag will have a unique ID number and other related data written on it. After Schaeffer receives a specific number of RFID tags for a city to mark garbage trucks, the company writes the city name, date, and size information into the tag’s memory. This information is also stored on the cloud-based WISTAR software platform.
When customers receive garbage trucks, employees read these tags using handheld readers. The read data will be uploaded to the WISTAR system, indicating that the items have been delivered.
(When a customer receives a new garbage truck, the employee uses a handheld reader to read its tag and enter the customer’s address)
Customers using the WISTAR system are equipped with handheld readers from SSI Schaeffer and SeedSpark. The company also offers handheld products from Intermec and Motorola. When the garbage truck is delivered to the customer’s home, the waste manager will use a handheld reader to read the RFID tag and enter the delivery address. The tag data will then be uploaded over the cellular network with the date of delivery. This data will also be written to the tag.
The data stored in the tags also provides redundancy so that employees can access the data even without an internet connection.
When the garbage truck is damaged, employees can use the handheld reader to write data indicating that it needs repair or replacement.
Additionally, when a user requests a repair or replacement of a garbage truck, this information is captured by the garbage management provider and uploaded to the WISTAR software. After repairs are complete, employees use handheld readers to update label records and ship again.
For some customers, the system is enough to help manage their garbage trucks. The technology lets these users know where the garbage truck is and if it needs servicing. Others can also attach RFID readers to garbage trucks to track when the garbage truck is emptied.
SeedSpark makes a stationary reader that attaches to a garbage truck. The device has GPS and cellular network capabilities. Each week, after the garbage truck is emptied, the reader reads the tag data to indicate that the garbage truck has been emptied.
Users can also encode the WISTAR reader firmware to identify a unique ID number that is part of the WISTAR system. In this way, other RFID tags cannot be read.
At first, the technology was only used to confirm that garbage trucks were being dispensed or emptied correctly. But waste management companies are always looking for other uses for the data. They hope to use the truck reader’s historical data to determine when garbage trucks are emptied, how fast they are emptied, and where trucks are delayed to better determine truck paths.
The latest version of WISTAR will provide a path optimization function to improve path efficiency.
Currently, about 25% of Schaefer container readers are using the WISTAR system.
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