Scales and their associated systems are the portals to solid waste operations: MRFs, transfer stations, and landfills. The first step in tracking volume and profit, these systems are getting more sophisticated.

By Janice Kaspersen

Mixing and Matching
Upgrading the Software
An Unattended Future?
Weighing In
Maximum Efficiency

The scale’s function is basic yet essential to the money-making end of the landfill or transfer station operation: Tipping fees depend on accurate weights. How that weight and a passel of associated data points can be manipulated, however, keeps changing as billing, reporting, and accounting systems become ever more sophisticated. Although a scale itself might last for many years, the peripheral equipment and software keep getting better, faster, and capable of performing more functions.

"It was costing me overtime big time to have somebody stay and run the end-of-the-month figures," notes Bobby Reeves, landfill coordinator at the Lumpkin County Transfer Station in Dahlonega, GA. Although the facility had been using an automated software package to collect data at the scalehouse - a DOS-based Vehicle Recording System by Cardinal Scale Manufacturing Company of Webb City, MO - a recent upgrade to Cardinal’s Windows-based WinVRS has sped up the accounting and billing process. Tallying end-of-the-month totals now takes about 15 minutes. "End-of-day-progress processing took about an hour and a half," recalls Reeves. "This does it in 10 or 15 minutes. It takes about half the time to put out a ticket."

Although the older program served its purpose for years, major changes at the Lumpkin County facility have made efficient data processing and billing more critical than ever: Two years ago the landfill closed, and now a transfer station operates on the same site, accepting waste from public and private haulers and handling a greater volume than the landfill itself did. "The landfill was taking in, on a big day, about 32 tons," reports Reeves. "We had 30 tons this morning before 11 o’clock."

Through all the changes, the facility has kept the same scale: a decade-old, heavy-duty 60- x 11-ft. concrete-deck Cardinal model 10060-PRC-I-C with a 40-ton concentrated load capacity. The scale could easily last a decade more - perhaps long enough to see the next generation or two of software.

The situation is the same at facilities around the country: old scales getting facelifts with new peripherals. Vehicle scales themselves are an expensive but usually long-lasting investment, even in the harsh solid waste environment. Rust is one enemy; some companies offer a coating, such the emulsified asphalt on Rice Lake Weighing Systems’ Survivor series, to help keep out the elements and ward off corrosion. Lightning strikes are another, capable of producing a surge that wipes out electronic equipment connected to the scale. Scales with excessive deflection, or vertical movement when weight is applied, eventually suffer metal fatigue, which can lead to a cracked deck. Even with these hazards, "Truck scales should last 20 years," declares Joe Grell, director of engineered product development for Rice Lake Weighing Systems of Rice Lake, WI. Ron Ricketts, regional sales manager with Cardinal, agrees: "It’s not uncommon for the scale to last 15-20 years or more. Some landfills, as they have filled and moved to newer locations, have even moved the scales they have."

Mixing and Matching

The typical scalehouse setup no longer consists of a simple scale indicator to show the weight and perhaps a printer to generate a ticket. Scalehouses are now sheltering entire automated systems that capture information in real time, reducing data-entry labor costs down the line. Date and time, customer account number, vehicle number, type of material (some facilities have different rates for greenwaste, construction and demolition debris, tires, and so on), number and type of containers, landfill cell destinations, and many other parameters can be entered by the scalehouse operator or the driver or, in a completely automated system, retrieved from a database once the system has identified the customer. Either way, it’s done at the point of transaction and not as a separate, time-consuming step.

New or expanding facilities, or those that need a new scale itself, tend to simplify by buying the whole package at once rather than picking and choosing components from different manufacturers. "They get it from one source - the scale, the instruments, and the computer all together. It’s a no-brainer for them," says Cardinal’s Steve Cole.

"Typically they like to purchase a turnkey system," agrees Tom Davis, president of Advanced Weighing Systems in Chippewa Falls, WI. "They’d like to buy the scale with the software, and if it’s an unattended system" - scale, software, and controller - "they’d like to buy it all as a single unit. The difficult part in selling systems like that is every landfill runs a little bit differently. They have different pieces of information they want to keep track of." Advanced Weighing Systems works with solid waste managers to integrate all the pieces of a system, including what for many is the most confusing element with the most bewildering and fastest-changing array of options: the software. Davis describes Rice Lake’s Automated Truck Scale (ATS-2) system with TransAct software as "configurable" rather than "custom": "We can configure it to each customer’s application without having to rewrite the code."

But what if the facility has a perfectly good scale already? "It’s not uncommon to mix and match," observes Cole. "Now everyone’s going to computer automation to do their data management, then taking the data into accounting packages, so we’re selling a lot of retrofits not only onto our own scales but also onto competitors’ scales."

The Monroe County Landfill in Wisconsin operates with an older Duraline scale, a standard scale indicator - brands and models have changed over time - and TransAct software. Equipment changes such as switching to a different scale indictor have not been a problem with the off-the-shelf connectors, reports Solid Waste Manager Allan Roof. "It’s kind of like hooking up a computer to a printer - make sure you’re using the right one."

"Your scale may be a dinosaur, but if it still weighs, you can have all the benefits of the current technological advances at a fraction of the price," points out Pat Dusang, heavy capacity product manager for Fairbanks Scales, headquartered in Kansas City, MO. "For two grand, you can upgrade your 50-year-old beam scale to do what a brand-new, $40,000 scale would do."

Upgrading the Software

Many different software packages are available. Upgrading from an older system to a faster one with more capability is one reason for buying a new package. For example, very early versions of Cardinal’s DOS-based Vehicle Recording System software were not Y2K compliant. Although later versions had no problem with the date change, Ricketts estimates that 80% of facilities have switched to the newer Windows version as the Lumpkin County Transfer Station did. As for the rest, "If they ever lose their current computer, they’ll have to change. They won’t have a choice."

Replacing unwieldy in-house - developed or legacy systems puts other facilities in the market for commercially available software. The Smurfit Newsprint Corporation in Pomona, CA, uses a high volume of recycled paper in its operation. The parent Smurfit-Stone Container Corporation has created a separate recycling company to provide recovered fiber to its newsprint, bag, and corrugated container plants nationwide, and it operates 29 collection centers and 12 brokerage offices that route the material to the plants. For Smurfit Newsprint, the arrangement means receiving and keeping track of shipments from a variety of brokers - as many as 60-70 transactions per day - which it had been doing with in-house software.

With a Mettler-Toledo scale and scale indicator already in place, the plant recently replaced its in-house system with WinBridge software from the same Columbus, OH, company. "We installed it in December 1999 - right before Y2K," says Daniel Baron, Smurfit’s information system coordinator. "It’s easier for the scale operators, so we decided to completely abandon our custom application to be used on the scale. We still use our legacy system for accounting and for processing the transactions, but all the scale transaction tickets are processed on the WinBridge system." WinBridge takes a three-tiered approach, offering Standard, Professional, and Advanced packages, each increasingly configurable. Smurfit, for example, has added extra tables or fields to accommodate its variety of suppliers. With both the Professional and Advanced packages, multiple workstations can access a common database through a network.

With the in-house system, "We encountered a lot of operator errors that we had to correct later on," notes Baron. Running on the IBM AS/400 platform, the system required operators to navigate through menus and type-in commands rather than pointing and clicking with Windows graphical user interface. "Now they’re not as afraid of the system. Some of the operators have Windows PCs at home, so they’re pretty comfortable using it," Baron says of WinBridge. "In addition, it allows us to put some restrictions on the fields to eliminate a lot of errors that we used to have." WinBridge’s optional Report Writer module helps Smurfit generate custom reports.

An Unattended Future?

Improving technology, rising labor rates, and a shortage of qualified employees have prompted some solid waste operations to move to partially or completely unattended scalehouse systems. Regular haulers that bring waste into the facility use cards to identify their vehicles. Card readers that read either magnetic strips or bar codes are the most common, but some systems employ radio frequency (RF) identification systems - "electronic license plates," Cole calls them - that identify a card or "tag" when it comes within range of the RF reader. "They’re the type of tags you’re seeing on toll roads and bridges," he points out, although noting, "There has not been a standardization so that one manufacturer’s reader will read another manufacturer’s tag."

Information stored on the card - or in a database from which the system can pull information once it has identified the vehicle - might include customer name, account number, vehicle number, and tare weight. Although it’s possible to store the vehicle’s weight on the card or in a database and weigh the vehicle only once as it enters the landfill - subtracting the recorded empty weight to determine the load size - many facilities prefer not to. "There can be quite a variance in tare weights," observes Cole. "Typically they’re going to weigh that truck in and out, even if they have that information stored, because of the accumulation of mud and debris. Also, did the truck completely empty all the material when it dumped? They only want to pay for the amount of weight that was left in the transfer station or the landfill."

A completely automated system may set a threshold scale weight; when a truck drives onto the scale and the threshold is reached, the system begins the transaction, prompting the driver to key in information. Others incorporate underground loop detectors to alert the system of an approaching vehicle.

Unattended systems have some drawbacks. For landfills that accept waste from individual cash customers, many of the incoming vehicles won’t have accounts or cards. Security can also be a problem when no one is at the scalehouse to inspect incoming loads for hazardous materials or items the landfill doesn’t accept. "It wouldn’t be feasible here because we not only have trucks and carriers coming in, we also have individuals from throughout the county bringing garbage in," says Reeves of Lumpkin County. "There are also several things that, by state law, we can’t accept, so we have to scan just about every vehicle that comes though."

There are ways around these problems. "Of course, you have to keep them honest, so we can integrate video cameras with the scale system to make sure the entire truck is on the scale," says Dusang of Fairbanks Scales. Some large, high-traffic facilities combine systems. "They’ll have both a manual scale and an unattended scale, and they’ll send trucks randomly to either one, so there’s a chance they could go to the manual scale and be inspected," says Mettler-Toledo’s Chris Jones. "It takes the load off the manual scale, and they might give their bigger customers access to that unattended system as a bonus" - faster access, shorter lines. Mettler-Toledo is introducing the Unattended Drivers Station, already popular in Europe, as an add-on module to the Professional and Advanced versions of WinBridge.

Running a system in combined mode is also possible for facilities with both regular customers and show-ups. "They’ll run all their charge customers unattended, and when a cash customer comes onto the scale they’ll click a button and switch over to attended mode," explains Davis. "The software’s flexible enough to go back and forth relatively easily with a simple mouse click." The advantage is that the scalehouse can be run with fewer operators, or the operators are free to work on other tasks much of the time.

A facility with the right conditions, such as the Monroe County Landfill, is the perfect candidate for an unattended system. The site is restricted to licensed, permitted haulers. Private individuals, or "show-ups" as Roof calls them, are generally not allowed, although the landfill occasionally accommodates them if they call ahead and arrange for someone to meet them at the scalehouse. "We have a ‘cash account’ card set up just for them, and we swipe that card and let them in. They’re charged a minimum fee or a per-ton fee depending on weight."

The scale is located almost a mile from the landfill, at the beginning of the landfill access road. "You can’t get back there if you don’t get through the scale system," states Roof, but adds, "The scaling operation is not the point of inspection. We do that right at the offloading site. The operators who are in the working face are making those load inspections."

Advanced Weighing Systems set up Monroe County’s system with the ATS II system and TransAct software. Drivers initiate a transaction by pulling onto the scale and swiping a bar-coded card through a card reader. "The system reads who they are, what the truck is, and what their billing account is. It reads the time, date, and weights. It asks the driver to enter some other information - some of it’s for us and some is for their own benefit, coding for their own customers," describes Roof. All this information is printed on the hauler’s receipt and on the landfill’s billing reports. "If we have a stored tare weight for that vehicle, they get a ticket and they’re done. If it’s a multiweight vehicle and they have to weigh out, the system processes the card again on the way out."

"We had an unattended scale system starting back in 1988," says Roof, recalling the simple magnetic card reader and the old Commodore 64 computer that housed the software. Three years ago the county began searching for a replacement system to handle its 700-800 monthly transactions. Although the system wasn’t initially designed for unattended operations, Roof worked with Advanced Weighing Systems and Rice Lake Weighing Systems, which provided additional hardware, making suggestions about what he and other landfills and material-handling sites would need. The system has been so successful that it was singled out in a study of all Monroe County departments, and the county’s highway department will soon be adopting the same system to keep track of materials handling at its unattended remote scale sites.

Roof’s advice to others considering an automated or unattended system is simple: "First and foremost, you need to know what you’re doing - know how to do it manually before you can do it electronically." Understanding a particular facility’s basic needs is vital as the systems continue to get more complex. What lies ahead? "Let me tell you what the future is," says Pat Dusang of Fairbanks Scales. "The future is a transponder on the front of the truck. The truck never stops. It runs over a weighing-in-motion scale and - boom - the system transponder picks up all the information - the weight and everything - and it ships a bill out right then."

MSW
Nov/Dec 2000