Trashery

Trashery: Demand-Based City Maintenance

We approached STARA, a city maintenance company that takes care of Helsinki, and asked about current challenges in city maintenance domain.

They told us that although they are collecting massive amounts of data, they are not putting that to proper use. Instead, they keep working the old way: they wipe the streets, empty trash bins and plant flowers according to a fixed plan.

However, what if we rethinked traditional city maintenance? Data tells us that some streets needs more cleaning than others. Some trash bins get full much faster while the others may be completely empty. What if the city could be cleaned not according to a plan but ON DEMAND and dynamically? What if we could better focus cleaning efforts on those 20% of areas where there are actually 80% of the customers (Helsinki dwellers)?

This is how we arrived at the concept of demand-based city maintenance. Using data and sensors, we know where in the city there’s high people traffic and we know how full trash bins are. Using this data, we can optimize cleaning efforts by focusing on high-traffic areas and cleaning just before bins get full.

As a result, we would disrupt the city maintenance domain making it on-demand and reduce costs considerably.

We can then scale this technology to snow cleaning, flower planting, tree watering and etc.