A handheld digital device with global positioning system capability is the newest addition to the city's residential garbage truck. City officials hope this new touchscreen system will allow residential garbage collectors to help plot daily routes for the three “clamshell” trucks that regularly run the roads looking to pick up the waste that does not go in hoppers-like leaves, boxes and appliances.
With the new system, “instead of going fishing, they go directly to where the piles are” says Assistant to the City Manager Jeff Shacker of the printout clamshell drivers will be given to follow Tuesday through Friday.
Astute readers of city utility bills may have noticed this month some garbage information in the “important messages” portion of the new bill. In addition to guidance on the pickup changes for the week of Good Friday; those that normally have pickup on Friday should put their rollcarts out for Thursday that week, there were a few lines talking about the effects of the new geocoding system. The bill said that effective Monday the city will be collecting yard trash the workday following your normal household garbage collection. For Friday's route, yard trash will be collected on Mondays.
The new technology, developed and tested by Clemson residents, lets the sanitation driver tap one of six categories on the handheld device, taking note of what type of waste they see by the road while running through collections of normal household garbage. Tapping that category immediately logs the type of trash, and the exact physical location of it. When refueling the garbage packer at the end of a shift, workers plug the device into a portal right at the pumps to download the information. A computer “engine” in the public works office takes that information and translates it into route plans for the city's three clamshell trucks for the next day's work. The yard waste drivers will canvas the city on Mondays without the aid of a route sheet, as weekends are a popular time to put trash by the curb and a Friday mapping would be obsolete.
The city has high hopes of cutting time on the road for the three yard waste trucks, thereby cutting fuel and maintenance costs. The hope is that this increased efficiency will allow one of the trucks to be parked. “With the fuel increases [in cost], we could be looking at up to a 30 percent savings in the utility division,” Shacker said. In addition to the fuel savings, the driver of that third parked truck would be freed up for other duties, Shacker says, like running the city's slope mower or a myriad of other jobs that would benefit from a worker with a commercial driving license. The City of Clemson is currently doing a study on the reduction in travel costs due to using the system.
The cost of the system, $10,500 for the “engine,” the cab device and a backup handheld device, was paid for using funds that had initially been slated for payroll in the utilities department. Some positions stayed open for quite some time and the city decided to use the leftover money to invest in this system produced by OA Technologies.
The possibilities for the usefulness of the system go beyond garbage collection. Eventually the city hopes to put devices into the four police cruisers that patrol each shift in Newberry. What information is then collected by the devices could then range anywhere from officers logging in out-of-service streetlights and tree limbs hanging low over power lines to the police department determining its own priorities and adding those notable items to the list of things for officers to look for and log.
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