Almelo tests pressing VConsyst waste bin in pilot

A clean city center at quality level A requires a substantial commitment of people and resources from the municipal cleaning service. To prevent litter, litter bins in the center of Almelo are now emptied twice a day. Almelo wants to significantly reduce the number of empties to twice a week and is therefore now testing two prototypes of VConsyst that can compress waste up to six times. The smart waste bin is linked to the VConsyst software platform and an app developed especially for this bin that displays notifications if necessary.

For VConsyst, the maker of the Bammens Capitole, among others, this pilot with Almelo is a good way to test both the hardware and electronics as well as the software of the smart waste bin in practice. “Our software platform VConsyst Dynamics, which is used by many parties to monitor the well-known underground containers, we have now also made it suitable for monitoring smart waste bins.

In combination with an app, users can see in real time the state of the CityPRESS, battery condition, filling rate, number of pressings as well as any failures,” says Rudo Hoekman, CTO of VConsyst. “We are curious to see if our solution works as we think it should according to our own tests.”

Learning process

Because this is a pilot, issues are bound to crop up, from which the parties involved will learn. The goal of the municipality of Almelo is to reduce the nuisance of litter at the busy center locations, Matthijs Veldhuis explains. “We also want to save time and thus costs for employee deployment for emptying, while maintaining a high image quality for a clean environment. This allows us to better deploy our employees on other cleaning tasks and better distribute the work across the other neighborhoods in Almelo.”

The data from the software system will undoubtedly offer new insights that will help reduce litter and together achieve a tidy living environment.

Clean environment

In addition to the software platform and app, battery life, solar panels, two different insertion openings and electronics are also tested for their performance. A major advantage for users is that the VConsyst CityPRESS has a lidless design, allowing waste insertion to take place unhindered.

All experiences from the pilot that runs for one year until Jan. 31, 2025 will be taken into account to develop the prototypes into smart litter bins that generate interesting data, prevent litter nuisance and reduce the burden on colleagues.

The objective is to make the center of Almelo a clean and pleasant environment for all users and residents. Deployment of smart waste bins and data can certainly contribute to this.