Los Angeles is all in on smart street lighting, having replaced over 80% of 215,000 streetlights with smart LED lighting. Starting a pilot program with ten bins would be a great way to evaluate various platforms and see which trash can is your treasure. While waste isn’t sexy, with low up-front costs and easy installation of new bins, it can be a great place to start to become a smart city. Assuming one waste management employee’s hourly wage is about $19 per hour, this equates to at least $1,577 in time saved by these smart trash cans per year. Using Pittsburgh’s numbers of 100,000 wasted hours checking 1,200 trash cans, some back-of-the-napkin math reveals that city workers spend about 83 hours a year checking each empty trash can. Pittsburgh is lining up to buy 500 smart trash cans for $580,000, which equates to $1,160 per can. Of course, BigBelly isn’t the only game in town. Each trash compactor costs around $4,000, so there would be a relatively low cost to getting a few to evaluate. These smart trash compactors alert operators when they are full, so perfect candidates for pilot programs would be sites where trash is often overflowing at pickup or where many cans are required. While you should do your own cost-benefit analysis for your own city, you may find that installing a few smart trash cans at highly-trafficked sites may provide the best return on your investment. While some have decided that the cost-benefit analysis of installing solar trash compactors are not worth it, every city has different costs. Philly claims to save $800,000 per year on trash pickup thanks to these cans. They started with an installation of 470, and started adding more year-by-year, growing that number to 900 by 2011.īigBelly operates for a week on the energy it takes to make a pot of coffee, and they hold about five times the volume of ordinary trash receptacles, requiring only 1/5th the number of trash truck pickups and send alerts when they are full. In 2008, Philadelphia started installing BigBelly solar-powered trash compactors in their city. How to Make a Smart City: 3 Smart City Projects 1. ![]() Here are some ideas that are being put into practice right now across the world, helping citizens save money, time, energy, or all of the above. Whether you are a mayor, a municipal employee, or a voting citizen, it can be helpful to know where to start in transforming your city or community. You don’t need hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to get started, even though those eye-popping numbers often show up in shiny municipal magazines. It’s a whole city! One answer is to start small, with small-scale smart city projects that require small budgets. Figuring out how to make a smart city can seem like a daunting task.
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