One of the latest municipalities to change their space with the Bigbelly system is the Township of Montclair in Essex County, New Jersey. This 40,000 resident township is located about 20 miles northwest of New York City, well-know to be home to baseball legend Yogi Berra, and home to Montclair State University.
Town leadership deployed the Bigbelly system to better manage public space waste in the Montclair Center area, the townships’s main commercial zone. In 2015, Montclair Center won the Great American Main Street Award from the National Trust for Historic Preservation which recognizes “communities exemplyfing the use of the Main Street Approach to revitalization of their traditional downtowns and/or neighborhood business districts.”
This area features many retail stores, restaurants, and boutiques which attract substantial foot traffic by residents, professionals, students, and visitors alike. The heavy volume of pedestrian traffic is accompanied by their need to dispose of waste on-the-go. The township needed a better system to manage the public space waste, keeping its quintessential town center clean while enhancing the streetscape.
Since deploying this smart technology platform to manage public space waste in the Montclair Center area, their weekly collections have been reduced by 82% from 7x per week on average to 1.2x per week on average. The township is fully leveraging the cloud-based platform with a measurable 98% operational efficiency.
“With the Bigbelly smart waste disposal system the Township will be able to optimize collection routines, track and measure operations, and show location-based waste patterns (such as volume, fill rate, collection activity). Measurable data from the stations on the street provides real-time reports on metrics such as waste volume, efficiency, and diversion when a recycling stream is present. […]
Bigbelly is a two-part waste disposal system that uses smart-connected stations on the street and cloud-based CLEAN Management Console software. The two components provide Community Services Department staff real-time and historical collection data for each station, making trash overflows a thing of the past. Staff manages the system from a centralized dashboard, analyzing operations and optimizing routes as needed.
The cornerstone of the Bigbelly system is the CLEAN Management Software. The smart stations on the street communicate with the software signaling their fullness status so Community Services staff know exactly which stations need to be emptied.
‘The new system is another example of the Township striving to keep our public areas clean for enjoyment by residents and visitors,’ said Mayor Robert Jackson, ‘and we now have the added benefit of a more energy- and resource-efficient refuse collection system.'”
Read the full announcement on the Township of Montclair Website
