Reference: Monitoring of fill-levels in underground bins in Prague

Right frequency Waste collection
1900 bins Monitored
1.28 Mio Population

Customer description

Prague is the capital and largest city in the Czech Republic and the 14th largest city in the European Union. Prague has about 1.3 Mio citizens, while its metropolitan area is estimated to have almost 2.6 Mio citizens. Operator ICT is Prague’s municipal enterprise dedicated to Smart City projects that also manages consultancy in ICT and implementation of ICT projects for municipal districts.

Problem description

The city of Prague has been considering the implementation of the underground bins and in 2018, they completed its implementation. This investment was the main impulse for waste monitoring. In order to optimize the waste collection of these bins, Operator ICT started the selection process of a smart waste management partner. In the autumn of 2018, the city of Prague has completed the process and decided to partner with Sensoneo — a global provider of smart, enterprise-grade waste management solutions.

Expectations from Sensoneo

The entire project is in line with the Smart Prague 2030 plan; which also includes „the zero waste plan“, which is based on responsible, intelligent waste management.

More about the plan – https://www.smartprague.eu/o-smart-prague

The main goal of the smart waste project was to create an effective tool for monitoring of the fill-levels and condition of underground bins with separated waste. This tool should provide the city with new information which will be used for the optimization of waste collection routes, creation of predictive models for the planning of collection routes and the placement of new waste containers.

Michal Fiser CEO of municipal enterprise Operator ICT

Implementation

There are 420 underground bins located across the city of Prague. Between November 2018 and January 2019, all 420 underground bins were fitted with Single ultrasonic bin sensors monitoring fill-levels of waste. This number was continually raised and currently in summer 2023, there are more than 1900 fill-level monitoring Sensoneo sensors deployed in Prague. Besides Sensoneo sensors, these bins are fitted with sensors for detection of congestion of ball-of-insert chambers and automatic fire alarms. 

Fill-level waste monitoring ultrasonic bin sensors.

 

Data visualisation

All data from Sensoneo sensors go to Prague´s official data platform – Golemio, where it is visualized and used for predictive models on waste collection frequencies.

 

Partners of the project

Logos of Slovanet, EY, Smart Prague and OICT Operator.

The pilot project and interim results

In May 2019, city representatives, waste collection company representatives and ICT Operator gathered to discuss interim results after 4 months of data gathering. 

They evaluated all acquired data and agreed on next steps on how to use new insights to optimize the waste collection process of the monitored bins. The team has also identified new opportunities on how to benefit from the data and develop a more efficient and better-organized waste management process in the city.

On 15th of June of 2020, the Prague City Council approved the final report of the project “Smart waste collection” project and recommended to continue and enlarge the scope of the project to all other underground bins/ bottom dump containers.

 

Watch the video report from PrahaTV

(Praha official TV channel – English subtitles)