Bringing Trash Collection under Control

In fact, in order to keep trash neatly removed from homes, busi­nesses and pub­lic areas, garbage trucks yearly burn about one bil­lion gal­lons of diesel fuel in the US alone. Because these are con­stantly stop­ping, and hav­ing to burn extra fuel to run the big com­pactors they all carry, they gen­er­ally get only two to three miles to the gal­lon. For every gal­lon of fuel burned, approx­i­mately 22 pounds of car­bon diox­ide is released into the atmosphere.

Today, a com­pany called BigBelly Solar is chang­ing the con­cept of waste col­lec­tion by imple­ment­ing on-site solar com­paction sys­tems. Their vice pres­i­dent for mar­ket­ing, Richard Kennelly, recently sat down with Organic Connections to tell us more about what his com­pany is doing.

“There are tens of thou­sands of trash recep­ta­cles all around the Los Angeles area, for exam­ple,” said Kennelly. “New York City has about twenty thou­sand on the streets and another twenty thou­sand in the parks. That’s a lot of trash cans, and it can cost $200 to $400 per can per month to pick up the trash.”

BigBelly Solar has come up with a very unique solution—one which is being quickly adopted by cities, uni­ver­si­ties, amuse­ment parks and other pub­lic places. The BigBelly Solar recep­ta­cle is a solar-driven trash com­pactor, about the same size as a pub­lic trash can, and the amount of money it can save on fuel and man-hours is astonishing.

“The cost to pur­chase a BigBelly isn’t recouped in the price of the recep­ta­cle,” Kennelly explained. “It is recouped in the ongo­ing sav­ings in pick­ing up the trash from that recep­ta­cle and tak­ing it some­where. That’s really the bulk of the cost, even after one year—let alone five or ten years.”

A good exam­ple of the sav­ings pos­si­ble is that of the city of Philadelphia, cur­rently BigBelly Solar’s largest cus­tomer. Prior to the city’s involve­ment with BigBelly Solar, they had seven hun­dred 35-gallon steel lit­ter bas­kets through­out Center City, their down­town area. They were spend­ing $2.3 mil­lion every year on 17 col­lec­tions per week for these baskets—2 to 3 col­lec­tions per day.

“That rep­re­sented a 70 per­cent reduc­tion, and the reduc­tion was in trips, in fuel, and emis­sions. They will be sav­ing $900,000 in the very first year. After 3 years, when the equip­ment is all paid for, the annual sav­ings will jump up to $1.5 million.”

What makes the solar-powered trash com­pactor viable is that it is sit­ting out­side all day long, able to col­lect energy. On a busy day, it might do only 10 or 15 min­utes worth of work, so there is a decent ratio of time to gather energy against time spent expend­ing that energy. It is effi­cient even in places that expe­ri­ence con­sid­er­ably cloudy weather, or in loca­tions that don’t receive direct sunlight.

Click on any image above to see a larger version.

The com­pactor is also fit­ted with a device that sends a mes­sage when it is ready to be picked up, so there is no need for a col­lec­tor to waste a trip just to check.

The BigBelly Solar com­pactor was the brain­child of envi­ron­men­tal entre­pre­neur Jim Poss, pres­i­dent and CEO of the com­pany, who had pre­vi­ously worked in the solar field and in the design of elec­tric vehi­cles and renewable-energy devices. The idea for the solar com­pactor came about as a result of this expe­ri­ence. The com­pactor actu­ally has a num­ber of the same com­po­nents as a solar-powered vehi­cle: a solar panel con­verts light into elec­tric­ity that is stored in a bat­tery, and the bat­tery runs an elec­tric motor, which then per­forms work.

After two years of test­ing, the first BigBelly Solar com­mer­cial units were unveiled on Earth Day 2005 in Queens, New York City. Improvements in the unit since that time have resulted in higher energy effi­ciency and a smaller size that is still able to process the same amount of garbage.

The com­pany is expand­ing rapidly. There are now over 3,000 of the devices in use out in the field, in 40 states and 20 coun­tries. In addi­tion to heav­ily traf­ficked urban areas, the com­pactor is also very pop­u­lar with uni­ver­si­ties. BigBelly Solar recently obtained Waste Management—the largest refuse ser­vices com­pany in the US—as a dis­tri­b­u­tion part­ner and their com­pactor can now be bun­dled in with the full array of Waste Management services.

BigBelly Solar is com­mit­ted to improv­ing the envi­ron­ment and economies of the world by uti­liz­ing effi­cient approaches to every­day prob­lems, and it’s won­der­ful to see such tech­nol­ogy play­ing a major role in clean­ing up our city streets!

For more infor­ma­tion, please visit the BigBelly Solar web­site at www.bigbellysolar.com.