This is why McDonald’s restaurants put cameras in their dumpsters

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Since 2013, its San Francisco-based startup Compology has been using cameras and artificial intelligence to monitor what’s thrown into dumpsters and dumpsters at companies such as McDonald’s restaurants and Nordstrom department stores. The point is to make sure that waste containers are really full before emptying and to prevent recyclable materials such as cardboard from being contaminated by other waste so that it doesn’t become waste too.

“We’ve found that most companies and people have the right intentions when it comes to recycling, but often they just don’t know the right way to recycle,” Gates, CEO of Compology, told CNN Business’ Rachel Crane.

To help them do it correctly, Compology places waste monitoring cameras and sensors in containers for industrial waste. The cameras take pictures several times a day and when the container is lifted for dumping. An accelerometer helps activate the camera on a garbage day.

AI software analyzes the images to find out how full the container is and can also let a customer know when something is where it shouldn’t be, such as a bag of trash thrown into a dumpster filled with cardboard boxes to to recycle. Gates said the company’s cameras can reduce the amount of non-recyclable materials no less than 80% thrown in waste containers.

For example, with McDonald’s Las Vegas dumpsters, Compology’s cameras and sensors showed that the company is generally doing a good job recycling cardboard packaging. But occasionally garbage bags were also thrown in, Gates said.

“When we saw that the garbage bags went into the cardboard containers, we sent a text message to the people on site, letting them remove it before the truck arrived the next morning and that they put waste in the recycling container. of contamination, which they shouldn’t be doing in the future, ”he said.

Brent Bohn, who owns and operates dozens of McDonald’s restaurants in Las Vegas and Phoenix, uses Compology in Las Vegas restaurants to help make sure restaurant employees recycle properly.

“The cameras have really streamlined that for us and were accountable to us as well as to our suppliers and the carriers we work with,” he said.

Compology has trained its system to sort through tens of millions of images, Gates said, and it uses photos taken from dumpsters that are now in use to get better at determining fullness and what’s in them. To date, it has processed more than 80 million images from the 162,000 cameras it has installed.

Compology's artificial intelligence system detects a contamination in an image from one of its cameras.

“The more images we get of the inside of dumpsters, the more accurate we can be,” he said.

Part of the reason Gates views Compology’s work as essential is because the United States, which used to send much of its scrap and waste to China, no longer does. China began to ban imports of recycling materials in 2017, citing environmental concerns from blending contaminants, and extended the ban in 2018.
Since then, the US has struggled to determine what to do with its recyclable materials, with some cities simply stopping recycling programs. Scrapping materials in the United States could make it easier for the country to recycle its own (and in fact, one of the goals of the United States Environmental Protection Agency is to increase the home recycling rate to 50% by 2030; it is currently hovering around 32%).

Compology’s service costs businesses between $ 10 and $ 20 per month per container. It generally saves them thousands of dollars per container per year in costs of transporting waste, Gates said, because it can also use AI to predict what the service schedule should be for each container, so it only gets picked up when it’s likely. will be. full.

Gates hopes that over time, Compology can help standardize the way waste is measured and reported – something that is currently inconsistent in the US.

“You have been able to measure how much electricity, water, gas you have used for decades,” said Gates. “What we do is measure how much waste you produce.”

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