CENTERVILLE — A local city is utilizing Artificial Intelligence to improve curbside recycling.
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As reported on News Center 7 at 6:00, the City of Centerville announced that some recycling trucks now have cameras that will scan what is inside recycling bins.
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Over the last several years, the city has had the ‘Recycling Right’ campaign, which tells people what they can and can’t recycle.
“It was a very labor intensive, manual process, we actually sent folks around on, on golf carts to look in recycling cans to help us out with that over the summer, so this will allow us to be able to do that type of work all the time,” Centerville Public Works Director Pat Turnbull said.
The city hopes that having cameras on the truck will help with efficiency.
“Reducing contamination in our recycling system lowers processing costs and improves the overall efficiency of our collection,” City Manager Wayne Davis said. “This technology allows us to target problem areas, educate residents and make better use of City resources.”
The camera will scan what’s inside the recycling bin as it’s emptied into the truck.
It will then notify the public works department of anything that doesn’t meet local recycling requirements.
The public works department will send a postcard to the home where the recycling bin was flagged with information on what can and can’t be recycled.
Turnbull said most people have good intentions when it comes to recycling.
“I think we’re really going to be able to help educate our community and everybody. Most people really do want to recycle right, I think what we found with our previous campaigns were our contamination percentage, I forget what the numbers were, but after each of the campaigns we ran, our contamination percentage was cut in half each time,” Turnbull said.
In the past, the public works department wouldn’t pick up recycling from homes that had consistent problems with items in their recycling bins until it was fixed, according to Turnbull.
Since the AI program is in the beginning stages, Turnbull said he’s not sure how they will handle repeat offenders yet.
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