January-February 2009

Customized Collection

Technological improvements can be worth the time, effort, and expense required to put them in place.

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Municipal solid waste managers say investing in next-generation technology is taking their fleets to higher levels of safety, operation, vehicle serviceability, and reliability.

Among those necessary technologies are lights and vision/awareness systems. But equally important are new technologies for brakes, transmissions, suspensions, retarders, and tires.

Solid waste collection managers say the return has been worth the investment.

Just ask Dave Graham, who owns Goulbourn Sanitation in Ottawa, ON. Goulbourn hauls an excess of 70,000 tons of waste each year with a fleet of 25 trucks. The company also has a waste transfer station and a material recovery facility.

Graham had been somewhat frustrated with his company’s drivers in their lack of consistency during pre-trip checkups.

“They don’t do what they’re asked, so we had to find a foolproof method to make sure all the tires are up to optimum pressure, because if you don’t, there’s a lot of things that do happen,” Graham points out. “You put a lot of wear and tear on your casing, blow tires, you put more pressure on the remaining tires in tandem, and there is prematurely wear and tear. The fuel efficiencies are lost.”

That foolproof method came through TireStamp, which Graham introduced to his operation two years ago. TireStamp is a tire-pressure monitoring and management system that collects and analyzes tire pressure, temperature, and mileage data.

TireStamp’s TireVigil Pro is a subscription-based service offering fleets interactive tire monitoring and alerts by capturing data relating to tire pressure and temperature from wireless tire-pressure sensors and transmitting the information through the Internet, cell phones, PDAs, or Blackberry devices.

Standardized or customized reports on tire maintenance and performance can be keyed in to tire type, vehicle type, routes, or other criteria. Charts and graphs can illustrate the condition of one tire in a fleet, tires on one vehicle, or all tires in a fleet.

Illustrating how TireStamp has worked to the benefit of his operation, Graham tells of the time when he went to his operations garage and noticed a driver pulling up in one of the company’s trucks with seven out eight tires appearing to be low.

Graham asked the driver if he had checked the tires in the morning. The driver replied that he had.

“Really?” Graham replied. “You’re going to check every tire, and you’re going to come back to me in my office and tell me what each one registered, and you’re going to tell me what you did.”

An hour later, the driver approached Graham to tell him that indeed, seven of the eight tires were low.

“That’s when I lost it, because he was driving at least six of the tires on the casing,” says Graham. “My operations manager told me he can’t look over [the drivers’] shoulders all of the time. This is what we’re doing with TireStamp. I’m very pleased on how it’s progressing.”

With TireStamp, Goulbourn’s management finds out which tires need to be changed and which need to have air added, even before the drivers get behind the wheel of their trucks in the morning.

“If any of the tires need to be topped up more than 10 pounds per square inch in two straight days, it’s time to change the tire,” says Graham. “If we get an alert that the driver’s at a location where he is rapidly losing air, we can get hold of him, get him pulled over, or we can get him to say he’s just losing air slowly over the hour, so we can get him back to our location where we can do the change versus sending out service calls.”

And downtime is money, as Graham points out.

“It’s all about efficiencies,” he says. “It’s all about catching it at the right time, so it’s constantly monitored. It’s almost a foolproof method.”

The technology is helpful in reducing liability issues as well, Graham adds.

Not counting labor, tires—which are routinely subject to punctures—are the second-highest vehicle operating cost after fuel, points out Peggy Fisher, TireStamp’s president.

Since 2004, the price of tires has skyrocketed, she adds.

“Every year, there are two or three price increases on truck tires by each of the tire manufacturers,” she says, adding that the costs of raw materials, along with the global demand for those raw materials, is the driving force behind the increases.

With the Chinese now building more cars and roads, the number of tire factories has mushroomed.

“They have thousands of miles of roads now, so they are cranking out tires for their own population as well as for export,” says Fisher. “India is doing the same, so that the global demand for raw materials for tires—natural rubber, synthetic rubber, various chemicals used in tire production, steel for radials—has increased in addition to petroleum, a major component in tires.

“People think oil is up, so tires are up. It’s more than that: Maybe oil will come down a little bit, but it does not look like the rest of the materials will come down, because the global demand is increasing.”

TireStamp’s tire-pressure monitoring service and asset management bridges data captured from tire-pressure sensors to a telematics device on a vehicle, which sends the data to TireStamp’s servers for analysis.

“We convert it from hot inflation to cold inflation and analyze it against the thresholds that fleets specify,” says Fisher. “If they want to know when a tire drops 10 pounds, we can pick that up and send them an alert. They have three thresholds: a notification, a warning, and then a vehicle alert.”

Another challenge faced by some refuse operations is that of heat, says Fisher.

“If the heat gets to be very high, we can alert them,” she says. “We can compare the heat on each axle end, so if one axle end gets higher than the rest, we can send an alert that indicates there’s a problem with the axle. It could be the brake is dragging, the bearing is frozen, or the tire is separated, for example. We don’t know what it is, but we can say it’s a problem area that needs to be checked out.”

A move toward retread tires has saved time and money in Michigan City, IN, garnering accolades for that municipality’s environmental stewardship.

Until early 2007, all of the city’s 350 vehicles—of which 18 are dedicated to solid waste collection—were running on new tires. City officials decided to give tire retreading a shot through Bandag.

With retreading, most of the original tire casing is reused and the worn tread replaced with a new tread that consumes fewer raw materials and energy needed in new tire production, generating a 75% savings in materials. The typical commercial truck tire weighs about 117 pounds; in contrast, 27 pounds of material are needed to retread a tire.

Most of those materials are oil-based, with an estimated 22 gallons needed to manufacture a new one, compared with seven gallons to retread a tire.

But Michigan City fleet mangers knew of preconceived notions about retreads, and so they equipped a few fleet trucks with retreads without informing employees.

“We just wanted to see what the wear life was and make sure they lived up to our expectations and the vendor’s expectations as well,” says Charlie Cate, Michigan City’s maintenance supervisor. “Then we also tried a few different tread designs before we moved them in.”

Ultimately, the retreads had performed as well or better than new tires. Additionally, uptime and vehicle readiness were as good as or better with retreads.

“They performed fabulously,” notes Cate. “Our refuse trucks are rear-loaders, so a lot of the time they’re snaking down the street, because we’re picking up both sides at once. There is a lot of tire wear, especially on the tandem rear tires. But these tires hold up very well.”

In fitting the city’s fleet with retreads, Bandag helped Michigan City officials evaluate tread designs for its various vehicles; ultimately, the BRM (Bandag All-Position Mixed) tread, a more vigorous tread designed for the refuse and construction industry, was chosen. Bandag recommended Michigan City use radial tires.

Bandag also helped Michigan City reduce the number of tire and rim sizes in its fleet and focus on critical issues like tire matching. Some loaders in the refuse operation were running on bias tires that were resulting in service calls every other week.

As a result of these moves, Michigan City’s fleet hadn’t required one service call.

Previous to installing retreads, tires represented 35% of the city’s total equipment costs. Now, tire costs have been reduced by 44% over new tire use.

The cost effectiveness of retreading is even more critical in a weak economy.

“A new tire costs about $254 and a retread is $146,” Cate points out, adding that the lifespan of a retread is equivalent to a new tire.

Retreading also has helped reduce disposal issues, says Cate. Previously, Michigan City had been purchasing new tires for its trucks to replace the worn ones, and four tires would go to the landfill each time. Now, the city is retreading one tire up to three times. At the present, up to 80% of the tires on the fleet are retreads.

The retreading initiative was so successful, Cate addressed the Northwest Indiana Regional Planning Commission’s environmental policy committee to spread the word.

By retreading, he told the commission, the city saved 15 gallons of oil for every new tire it did not have to purchase, thus saving an overall 3,200 gallons of oil over a two-year time period.

In addition to retreading the waste collection fleet vehicle tires, Michigan City has a tire management program in which employees were trained by Bandag to properly change and balance the tires.

Michigan City’s initiatives were recognized in 2007, when the state awarded the municipality for taking the Indiana Comprehensive Local Environmental Action Network (CLEAN) Community Challenge by improving its operations and services and for becoming more environmentally friendly.

In addition to BRM, says Chris Hoffman, manager for global tire products for Bandag, the company offers a wide range of products for municipal waste companies. Other options include BRX (Bandag Rib On X)—for those municipalities that operate on a bidding process and have to provide a low acquisition price—and Waste Hauler Rib.

Hoffman says his recommendation to most municipal fleets is to pay more for the BRM. Its longer-lasting lower cost per mile, along with fewer mounts and dismounts for safety, lowers long-term costs.

“For municipalities, they can get value for their worn casings, which acts as an asset in retreading instead of disposing them or selling them to a casing broker where they won’t get the value,” Hoffman says.

Photo: Global Sensor Systems Inc. Global's Search-Eye Sensor System uses infrared technology to prevent accidents.

Solid waste operations utilize retreading more than any other industry, he says. “They will retread a casing up to five times. There are cost and tax-based pressures. They are harder on their vehicles because of the routes and the weight of the vehicles, so they tend to go through tires faster. They are truly aware of the cost of tires and tend to want to manage that.”

Dealing With Brakes
Brakes are another concern for waste collection fleets.

According to information gathered from research studies by Brake Sentry, brake adjustment defects account for nearly one-third of all truck crashes and have the highest rate of out-of-service violations.

Brake Sentry is a visual brake stroke indicator designed for severe-duty vocational application. The stationary referencing gauge shows the legal stroke limit, and a pushrod indicator is at each brake chamber, enabling visual inspection for out-of-adjustment conditions without having to rely on “feel.”

David Peck is the fleet manager for the Raleigh, NC–based Waste Industries, with 33 operations and facilities and 10 landfills throughout the southeastern United States.

The operation includes 736 heavy power units, 250 light to medium power units, and 200 pieces of landfill equipment.

Waste Industries started utilizing Brake Sentry technology in 2003 after a company task force of managers brainstormed ideas to improve the reliability, safety, and performance of the company’s vehicles.

Utilizing Brake Sentry technology was one of the first resulting initiatives.

“One of the things we were trying to do was to be able to identify the brakes that were out of adjustment without having to get under the trucks, chalk the wheels, release the brake, and then have someone be inside the truck and make the brake application while we measured and checked out the stroke,” says Peck.

“Brake Sentry’s technology was inexpensive and allows us to be able to see the condition of the brake adjustment on all wheel positions without crawling under the truck and creating safety risks,” he adds.

Waste Industries management calculated that the technology would save 15 minutes per vehicle per week, and, with 736 vehicles, “That was a tremendous savings in a year’s time based on what we were paying for the Brake Sentry itself,” says Peck.

Peck also praises the product’s liability and adds that, because of its performance, “I don’t have to worry about whether the person looking at the brakes is a brake inspector. He can look at it, and if it falls within the parameters he is good to go.”

Fleet drivers also no longer have to test the brakes by slamming them before they leave the property to make sure the tires wouldn’t slide, says Peck.

“With anti-lock brakes they don’t slide anyway, so it’s really difficult to test them from that perspective,” says Peck. “This simply gave us an assurance from our drivers and technicians that the brakes were in adjustment prior to going on the highway or it kept us from overadjusting the brakes and wearing them out faster.”

Five years into using Brake Sentry, Peck declares it “very reliable, user-friendly, and a highly effective method to reduce maintenance and labor costs and improve safety, which is the biggest reason we did it. “

Prior to using Brake Sentry, Waste Industries’ personnel were adjusting the brakes on every truck at least weekly.

“We would bring them through the shop and check them at least once a week, and the only way we could check them was adjust them,” says Peck.

Peck says Brake Sentry technology is simple and, if installed correctly, very reliable.

“It takes the abuse we give it from the landfill, the dirt, and the mud. We‘ve had no problem with the Brake Sentry system since we implemented it.”

Widespread confusion regarding the proper inspection and maintenance of brakes equipped with automatic slack adjusters exists at every level in the industry and is perpetuated in many fleet maintenance operations, says Daniel Judson, technical director for Brake Sentry.

“Rather than measuring the ‘applied stroke’ of the pushrod to identify defects for correction, the majority of technicians are routinely performing manual adjustments to automatic slack adjusters,” he adds. “Instead of correcting, they are adjusting.”

Judson cites a recent report of an accident investigation issued by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) which concluded that “manually adjusting automatic slack adjusters is dangerous and should not be done except during installation or in an emergency to move the vehicle to a repair facility.”

Having equated adjusting with correcting, Judson says, the majority of technicians don’t know how to identify or correct contributing causes, so they simply adjust the brakes.

“In effect, this would be the same as a mechanic just topping off the coolant level in an engine that had lost all its coolant,” says Judson. “He is certainly adjusting the level, but he’s definitely not correcting the cause.

“This common practice conceals brake defects, returns defective units to service, drives up costs, increases exposure to risk and liability, and effectively defeats the purpose of preventative maintenance inspections.”

Judson points out that with long intervals between preventative maintenance procedures and other factors that can adversely affect the function of automatic brake adjusters, the likelihood that some brakes will be out of adjustment is very high. “This will cause accelerated wear on those brakes in compliance and ultimately result in more frequent brake work, downtime, and parts and labor expense,” he says.

The ability to have a good line of vision to avoid mishaps or injuries is a key reason why many waste hauling fleets utilize video systems.

Such is the case with the department of public works for the city of Glendale, CA, where David Cole works as the mechanical maintenance administrator.

Glendale’s fleet, which includes 46 waste collection trucks, has had cameras on each truck since the early 1990s.

“The reason we do that is to make it easier for the truck drivers to see where they are backing up, because you can’t see behind you,” says Cole.

Glendale uses Intec Video System cameras, specifically the CVC240HXL. The watertight black-and-white camera can provide clear images in even low-light conditions. The camera offers a horizontal view of at least 125 degrees and a vertical view of at least 100 degrees.

The latest Intec Video System camera, CVC500AH, is a watertight color camera that delivers a horizontal field of view of 123 degrees and a vertical field of view of at least 91 degrees. The audio-equipped camera enables the driver to hear activity surrounding the vehicle.

Another option is the CVD640LCD, made for extreme duty, and featuring automatic brightness adjustment, automatic onscreen distance markers and a standard extended sun visor.

Accidents related to backing up had become an issue some of the drivers were dealing with prior to Glendale installing cameras on the fleet.

“You’d either have to have somebody back you up, or you’d have to get out of the truck and look behind you, so cameras save you time,” says Cole.

“In the old days, you had three men because you were emptying trash into a rear-loader, but today, with automated refuse collection, you’re a one-man route. So you want to be able to see behind you, and you really don’t want to have to get out every time you want to back up the truck. Also, there are some blind spots on the opposite side of the driver.”

The waste collection fleet vehicles also have a camera on the mirror pointing forward to cover another blind spot, where drivers have a difficult time seeing children, trash cans, and small cars, Cole says.

While cameras aren’t inexpensive, the return on investment comes through safety, he notes. “You can’t be too safe. Where cameras save you is in accident costs. The thing with Intec Video System cameras is when you buy them, you buy them one time. They are more expensive than any other camera, but they last.”

Cole says he’s learned from past experience with less expensive cameras that they need to be replaced up to six times over the life of the waste collection vehicle.

“With my labor costs, I don’t want my guys to be spending their time working on cameras. So anytime we can find something that is of higher quality that’s going to create less labor costs down the road, we do it.”

With safety being paramount on a waste collection vehicle, fleet managers appreciate any technology that protects the well being of the general public as well as that of the drivers. A child standing behind a truck, for example, is a potential disaster.

With that in mind, Toronto’s Steve Plaskos, the 2006 Fleet Manager of the Year in Canada, has always specified Global Sensor Systems for his fleet’s trucks.

Global Sensor Systems manufactures the Global Infrared Search-Eye Sensor System.

This technology features three sensors on the rear of a vehicle, says Ray Glenn, general manager of Global Sensor Systems.

“It’s a different infrared technology than most people would be familiar with,” says Glenn. “This is a technology we call a modulated infrared. With this technology, it doesn’t matter if the object is moving or stationery, so it’s not motion-detecting and it doesn’t matter if the object is hot or cold.”

The system initiates itself when the gearshift is placed in reverse. It is available with or without automatic braking. If an object is detected while backing up, the brakes are applied automatically while a sonalert and warning light are simultaneously activated.

In systems without automatic braking, the sonalert and light warn the driver of the object in the protected area. Moving the gearshift to any other position shuts off the system.     

A control box in the cab allows the operator to override the automatic braking feature for situations in which the truck needs to be near a loading dock or park near another vehicle. The warning system continues to activate even when the brakes are overridden.

Vertical coverage is achieved by angling the sensors down toward the ground at the back, “but they’re set up so they run out of range about a foot off the ground to make sure you’re not picking up the ground because it would also react to the ground and put the brakes on,” says Glenn.

Toronto officials considered Global Sensor System technology about 20 years ago when Plaskos was a mechanic. At the time, there were some safety incidents (although not in Toronto) that drew attention to the fact that fleet trucks needed to be equipped in such a way to avoid accidents.

Now as fleet manager, Plaskos continues to specify Global Sensor System technology to this day. 

“We’re still using the same infrared technology because it’s very effective,” he says. “We’ve also experimented with cameras in the back. We also get units with cameras in addition to these as well and the reason why we do that is the camera only captures so much.”

A camera can’t catch whether something is under the refuse truck, for example.

“The infrared covers a seven-foot span for us where three or four feet of that is not picked up by the camera. That’s why we continue to use it. We think it’s a great product,” Plaskos says.

Toronto’s municipal fleet has less than 5,000 trucks of which more than 400 are designated to collect solid waste. The Global Sensor System is specified most of all for the trucks in Toronto that back up frequently around residential areas and schools. 

Author's Bio: Carol Brzozowski specializes in topics related to waste management and technology.