Reducing 1st Recycling room according to Bintel's average corresponds to the CO2 emissions from a staggering 1000L of diesel according to the Swedish Energy Agency.
1000 liters of diesel can drive a garbage truck about 1,500-2,000 km according to statistics from some of our waste management companies.
If 3% of environmental rooms, on a normal route, improve their sorting to "Bintel standard" - this corresponds to a reduction in environmental impact equivalent to the climate effect of the emissions from the entire garbage truck route.
These are numbers that are hard to take in, and that create Syntax Errors before you even start doing the math. At Bintel, we believe that you should use data in all ways that reduce the environmental footprint of waste management - both through sorting and through optimized logistics - but focus on what gives the most effect: Increased sorting.
In our projects, we often measure the positive environmental impact of a project. Since we are in an industry with a huge environmental focus, projects with a negative environmental impact will be stopped. This is regardless of how much money is saved. A pretty nice industry in that way.
So what is the environmental impact of our projects? We've done the math and come up with some conclusions. Conclusions that give the industry Syntax Error - it's just a bit hard to grasp.
Kilometer, kilometer, kilometer...
Data-driven waste management is often associated with collecting level measurement data from various containers, and then emptying them demand-driven. So, we throw the old schedule in the cylinder archive, and let data control when a property is visited by the garbage truck. Nothing new under the sun really. But what effect does it have, and what potential does it have for environmental savings?
We often see reductions of 25-50%. This saves money for the customers, and cuts working hours for haulers and waste management companies. There is a certain environmental saving in this, as the emptying processes can be energy-consuming, and there are other benefits of cutting heavy traffic in densely populated areas. In the long run, it can also mean that fewer cars are needed to service the current waste container stock.
But if we're talking about pure CO2 savings in pure logistics projects, well, it takes some work to get on the right side of the 0 line.
We at Bintel work with all applications in the waste industry, but have many projects with a focus on Recycling room linked to housing. In one of our projects, in this application, we have about 400 Recycling room connected. Here we see that demand management of emptying can cut the number of stops by 10-15%, while largely maintaining the number of kilometers. The reason is that the collection points are very close together, and that many of the kilometers of the route lie in driving back and forth to the dumping site.
The environmental effect of route optimization in these cases is relatively small. The environmental benefit is found here in being able to ensure that containers for recycled materials are emptied on time and do not become overcrowded, thus avoiding the disposal of these fractions in residual waste.
However, in other applications, such as recycling stations, Bintel sees significant environmental benefits from running demand-driven.
Sorting, sorting, sorting...
Another way to reduce the carbon footprint of a waste station is to increase the sorting rate, i.e. to reduce the amount of residual waste going to incineration. In this way, recycled materials are collected, recycled and some trees can be allowed to grow for a few more years in our country.
In our green room projects, we can in the majority of cases reduce residual waste by 20% through increased collection of recyclable fractions. A rule of thumb we have is that you can cut 2.5 tons of CO2e per Recycling room and year, if you work with your environmental stock. Let's say a small town has 1000 Recycling room, this gives a saving of 2.5 kTon CO2e per year!
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So, if you compare these two ways of using essentially the same data, you can see that the environmental leverage for increasing sorting is often many times greater than that for reducing garbage truck traffic.
Reducing 1st Recycling room according to Bintel's average corresponds to the CO2 emissions from a staggering 1000L of diesel according to the Swedish Energy Agency.
1000 liters of diesel can drive a garbage truck about 1,500-2,000 km according to statistics from some of our waste management companies.
If 3% of environmental rooms, on a normal route, improve their sorting to "Bintel standard" - this corresponds to a reduction in environmental impact equivalent to the climate effect of the emissions from the entire garbage truck route.
These are numbers that are hard to take in, and that create Syntax Errors before you even start doing the math. At Bintel, we believe that data should be used in all ways that reduce the environmental footprint of waste management - both through sorting and through optimized logistics - but focus on what has the most impact: Increased sorting.
