Municipal Solid Waste Collections and Route Optimization Handbook

The Municipal Solid Waste Collections and Route Optimization Handbook is a blog series to go into the operational aspects of municipal solid waste collection.  The purpose of this series is to provide information from past experiences that will give managers the information to ever improve waste collection efficiency and effectiveness.

Although the collections portion (versus disposal) accounts for over two thirds of the cost of a municipal solid waste management system, the waste industry lacks standards and best practices for collections operations.  There are no industry-wide key performance indicators for monitoring performance and a limited ability to evenly compare one operation with another.

Technology adoption success rates, such as waste route optimization software, often fail, because of a lack of understanding of their operational needs. Developing routes is typically no more advanced than counting houses to be on a route. Using the most cost effective disposal facility on each route rarely factors in travel costs.

By providing best practices, standards and key performance indicators, collections professionals will be enabled with the tools and methodologies to improve operations and maintain efficiencies.  The waste collections professional has typically limited options for career growth outside of management.  At the same time, the technology demands are increasing.  Elevating the waste collections industry to have industry standards and service quality and effectiveness metrics to compare themselves will help evolve collections professionals with the ever increasing demands as technology and the industry evolves.

The Municipal Solid Waste Collections and Route Optimization Handbook is provided by Route Optimization Consultants in a series of posts getting in-depth into topics of:

• Route optimization for solid waste collection,
• Facility siting,
• Staff and stakeholder participation,
• Route data collection,
• Route data maintenance,
• Mobile workforce technology,
• Customer service,
• Public education campaigns,
• Fleet maintenance,
• Procurement for vehicles, carts, maintenance, disposal, collection operations, and managed competition.
• Solid waste systems and strategies,
• Bulky waste collection strategies,
• Recycling collection strategies, and
• Yard waste collection strategies.

See our first in the series here:

Key Performance Indicators in Waste Collections Route Optimization – How to assess productivity and monitor performance.