Mayor Nutter talks about his first two years in office,
and what 2010 holds.

Philadelphia, PA – On Dec. 22, City Paper sat down with the mayor for a brief Q&A.

City Paper: Let’s talk about your vision for the next 12 months. What do you hope to accomplish?

Mayor Nutter: Part of this is maintaining focus on the things that really matter to people on the ground each and every day. We’re going to continue to support our Police Department and drive down crime in the city. We’re going to stay focused on children. It really is, though, ultimately about jobs, and creating an economic environment where people can get work or get training. Whether that’s the green economy or sustainability, or the waterfront. We’ve made waterfront development a major effort here. … What you’re going to see with Greenworks this year is the Philadelphia Recycling Awards program, which will help us boost our recycling rates, which will save us money. And it’s good for the city, good for the planet. We’ll continue to reduce our energy costs. We’re in the process of revamping the zoning codes, we’re going to have more BigBellies [BigBelly solar powered trash compactors] on the streets.  A big campaign for cleaning up, a big city anti-litter campaign.

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Bourne, MA – Bourne has been awarded funds for three renewable energy projects from the Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust for a project that furthers the Commonwealth’s clean energy goals.

Bourne will receive:

$4,657 to purchase one BigBelly Solar Trash Compaction System. This unit is powered by solar photovoltaic technology and will help Bourne reduce trash collections, reduce litter and generally improve the Town’s waste management operations. …

“This funding will help the town of Bourne educate the public and work towards a cleaner more energy efficient future. I am impressed with their dedication to this cause,” said State Rep. Matthew Patrick, D-Falmouth.

Dozens of other communities are also using this matching funding for projects such as solar electric arrays, solar trash compactors, renewable energy educational materials, and other renewable energy projects and related materials.

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City buys two solar-powered trash cans that compact their contents

Winston-Salem, NC – Winston-Salem is using the sun to crush trash downtown.

The city has purchased two solar-powered public trash cans that double as compactors. …

The BigBellys use solar power to compact trash as it sits inside cans on the street. The two cans bought by the city are both downtown — one at the corner of Fourth and Trade streets, the other at the corner of First and Church streets.

“We’re testing it,” said Johnnie Taylor, the director of the city’s sanitation department. “We’re doing an empirical test just to see how well it actually works.”

Larger cities, including Philadelphia, Boston and New York started using the solar-powered compactors as early as 2006, in an effort to save money. Smaller cities, including Somerville, Mass., also have started using the compactors in small numbers.

“It looks like it could free up crews to do other things, like additional cleaning in the city’s planters,” Taylor said.

… The compactors reduce collection routes because they do not need to be emptied as often as regular trash cans. Taylor said he expects the cans to save on compacting costs as well, because they compact trash using solar energy rather than electrical power.

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Big praise for BigBelly

It’s no belly flop. BIDs (Business Improvement Districts) around the borough now boast BigBelly solar compactors, which harness the power of the sun to compress refuse and require fewer trips by garbage trucks. The nifty trash and recycle bins will help the city decrease its sanitation truck trips and benefit Bronx business corridors.

Better yet, the bins are manufactured by a Bronx-based firm in Hunts Point. DEC Green calls the BigBelly as one of the decade’s 100 most innovative products. The firm is the official New York State BigBelly manufacturer; other firms manufacture the bins in other states. Because they compress refuse, the BigBelly bins hold five times more than standard bins of the same size.

DEC Green president Franklin Cruz worked with the Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation and Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr. to install two pairs of BigBelly bins in the E. 161 Street, Jerome-Gun Hill, Fordham Road, Hub-Third Ave, Southern Blvd and White Plains Road BIDs.

“Garbage in a traditional bin takes up so much space,” Cruz said. “A solar compactor makes a lot of sense economically and environmentally. You can monitor by computer exactly the [level of refuse] in each bin.”

Each BID boasts two BigBelly recycle bins and two BigBelly trash bins. The bins … will be emptied by the city Department of Sanitation. The BigBelly is the world’s first and only solar-powered bins designed to decrease sanitation truck trips, Cruz said. The bins debuted in 2005.

BID executive directors are intrigued.

“We’re excited to have BigBelly bins installed in our BID,” White Plains Road BID executive director Larry Prospect said. “[The bins are] installed on Pelham Parkway South in front of TD Bank and Bank of America.”

Wilma Alonso, executive director of the Fordham Road BID, was thrilled to see bins installed at Webster Ave. and Fordham Road and at Grand Concourse and Fordham Road.

“We’re testing [the bins] by placing them in high traffic areas where there’s always an issue with overflowing trash,” she said. …

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Budgets are tight… local cities and towns are trying desperately to find ways to cut budget without raising taxes, laying off workers, or cutting services. The solution… innovation of course. Check out how BigBelly Solar is saving municipal governments millions in an area that nobody else was thinking about – trash collection.

Powered 100% by solar, the BigBelly solar trash compactor has had implications way beyond just reducing the cost of paying trash collectors to empty cans that aren’t full and reducing the litter created by overfilled trash cans. In fact, cities who’ve adopted the BigBelly solar compactors have relieved traffic congestion, and smog while raising awareness of how solar power can save money well beyond just the costs of lighting or heating and cooling buildings.

How they work:

The BigBelly is a smart, self-powered robot that automatically compacts about 5 trash cans worth of trash into a single bag, saving about 4 out of 5 collection trips. When they’re close to full, the BigBelly sends off a text message to the local trash collectors telling them they need to come and empty them.

BigBelly’s technology is nothing we haven’t seen before, a simple solar panel at the top of the receptacle powers the compactor, and a sensor is installed that fires off the text message when the cans are close to getting full. What is really impressive about BigBelly is the impact their products are having on municipalities all over the United States. By reducing the amount of trash pickups in densely populated urban locations, BigBelly compactors are actually curbing emissions from the collection vehicles, freeing up traffic flow (ever been stuck behind a garbage truck in the city while they hurl bags in off the sidewalk?) and reducing the amount of innocent civilians exposed to the smell of open garbage trucks stopped in front of them in traffic. It’s a win-win all around.

Moreover, city governments are reporting that the reduced need for trash collection in their cities is helping them put those workers to better use, improving maintenance to public areas like parks and recreation facilities.

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Waste hauler demos solar-powered compactor seen as cost-saver for cities

Oceanside, CA – There’s a new attraction at the pier city officials hope will draw lots of visitors. It’s a solar-powered trash compactor, along with an adjacent recycling bin.

The compactor was donated to Oceanside by Waste Management Inc., which hopes to encourage municipalities across the country to buy them.

Over the next few months, several more of the bright green and yellow compactors will be installed in San Diego County as part of the demonstration program. One will go into Carlsbad, said Waste Management spokeswoman Jordan Cole, with the other locations being determined.

Cities can save money with the machines, because compacted garbage doesn’t have to be collected as frequently, said Ken Ryan, district manager for Waste Management of North County. They typically repay the cost in about two years, he said.

Ryan and Oceanside officials gathered Wednesday afternoon at the pier to explain how the compactor works. A solar panel covered by a transparent panel on the top provides the power, which is stored in a 12-volt battery that can run the compactor for several days. The trash can be squeezed into just 20 percent of its normal volume. …

The compactor has safety features so it won’t compress the trash when a hand is placed inside. Because it’s enclosed, animals can’t get inside, and the waste is kept from getting outside. To discourage vandalism, it’s bolted down.

The solar-powered compactor is part of Oceanside’s effort to be environmentally friendly, said Colleen Foster, a management analyst with the city.

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Boston, MA – The only solar-powered trash compactor that most people could name is Wall-E, the fictional lovestruck robot from this summer’s Pixar movie. But in Boston, San Diego, Seattle, and more than a dozen other major cities, you can meet the real thing: the BigBelly Cordless Compaction System, a 200-gallon robotic trash container manufactured by Needham, MA-based BigBelly Solar and powered entirely by the sun.

Since introducing its invention on Earth Day in 2005, the startup has sold 2,000 of the units, which can collect up to five times as much trash as a regular can; several of them are on Tremont Street in Boston’s South End (where they make convenient stops on a dog walk—see photo below). And now the company is introducing its first big upgrade to the machines: a wireless system that tells waste-removal crews when the cans are full and need to be emptied.

The wireless feature feeds text messages about each can’s status into an online Google map that garbage truck drivers can use to plan the most efficient pickup route. It’s a key part of Big Belly’s original vision for the system, which is all about reducing the amount of time, money, and fuel that cities, campuses, and other institutions must devote to waste collection.

In the U.S., garbage trucks burn about a billion gallons of diesel fuel a year and get an appalling 3 miles per gallon, points out Richard Kennelly, vice president of the 18-person company, which also has offices in Seattle. Organizations that buy BigBelly containers, he says, can cut back on garbage truck trips by 80 percent.

Adding a wireless function solves one problem with the original BigBelly containers, which was that sanitation departments didn’t know exactly when to send trucks to empty them. “One of the advantages of having a self-powered robotic trash receptacle is that it’s intelligent—it knows when it’s full, by sensing how much resistance the compactor is getting from the trash as it becomes denser, and it communicates that information through LED lights on the top,” Kennelly says. “We always knew that having the BigBelly send that information wirelessly would bring a tremendous efficiency advantage. The time was eventually right to add that feature.”

But BigBelly makes trash containers, not software, so it outsourced development of the new wireless feature to Symphony Services, a Palo Alto, CA- and Waltham, MA-based contract software developer with engineering centers in India and China. Symphony built the software that the BigBelly units use to send text messages, as well as the Web-based system that shows the cans’ status on a map.

“We were pretty excited to work for these guys,” says Indranil Mukherjee, Symphony’s vice president of products. “It’s a green product with a really clear return-on-investment in gas savings. Now that these cans have a way of communicating back to a central server, any user who has access to that can figure out how full a particular trash can is, and when it needs emptying.”

BigBelly has been testing the wireless-enabled containers in Boston and Somerville, MA, and will be ready to offer the text-messaging system as an option on new cans starting in January. Kennelly says the company hasn’t decided how much to charge for the add-on, which goes by the name CLEAN, for Collection Logistics Efficiency And Networking. But the text-messaging charges and the Web-based interface will be included in the price, he says. The company can also retrofit existing BigBelly units with the wireless technology.

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