Alien RFID Technology Used to Encourage Increased Recycling in Unique Municipal Program

Alien Technology and CDO Technologies, a full-services systems integrator for government and commercial customers, have cooperated on a novel municipal program designed to increase community recycling levels through the use of RFID technology.

The program is being deployed by the city of Dayton, OH, to lower recycling costs and increase participation in existing recycling efforts. With a population of more than 200,000, Dayton has become challenged by the increasing expenditure associated with sending trash to landfills at a cost of more than $30 per ton from the city’s 67,000 homes.

To help drive efficiencies and greater participation in their recycling efforts, Dayton deployed a solution from CDO that is based on Alien’s Enterprise Class RFID Readers and CDO’s revolutionary High Value Asset Tracking (HVAT) platform. RFID tags are attached to the recycling bins, and Alien’s ALR-9900+ Readers are installed on the recycle/garbage trucks. Residents who make use of their 32- or 96-gallon recycling containers are entered in a lottery the following month for one of four $100 prizes. Dayton just awarded the first $100 rewards to four residents.

The city of Dayton uses the HVAT platform to integrate with the Alien hardware and intelligently parse the data to extract meaningful information and provide actionable results. Through this interpretation process, the city can strategically plan its routes, schedules, budgets and usage rates. The custom report generation and modular nature of HVAT allows city officials complete visibility and control.

According to city officials, the results from this RFID-based program have been surprisingly quick, with a 40 percent increase in recycling participation and an increase in recycled material from 200 to 535 tons in just the first few months of operation. The program has also allowed the city to restructure routes, renegotiate recycling rates and balance staffing – all leading to a return of investment that is projected in less than 12 months and a savings of more than $100,000 per year.

“This solution would not have been possible without a physically robust RFID reader that had excellent RFID tag read capabilities and was easy to configure and maintain,” said Richard Sleigh, CDO Technologies program manager. “We were also concerned about the challenging RF environment and metal surfaces of the city trucks, but after testing an array of possible solutions, we selected Alien’s ALR-9900+ Enterprise Class Reader as the most robust, reliable and easy to use solution.”

“This program has experienced tangible benefits in such a short period of time that we anticipate other municipalities will move to quickly replicate these efforts nationwide,” said Mike Frieswyk, Alien Technology, vice president of sales and marketing. “We look forward to Alien technology continuing to be a vital component to the expansion of programs like this that benefit residents, cities and the environment alike.”