Waste collection on a fixed schedule treats every bin the same, and every council knows the two failure modes by heart. Crews empty bins that did not need it, and miss the ones overflowing a street away. Canada Bay's smart waste program was built to answer three practical questions with data instead of guesswork.
The Waste Problem Every Council Recognises
The program set out to determine three things across the council area.
- Whether a given area needs more bins or fewer
- Which empty bins are being collected unnecessarily
- Which bins overflow regularly and need more frequent collection
None of those questions can be answered from a truck window. They need continuous fill-level data across the whole fleet of bins, which is exactly what bin-level sensing provides.
Sensors That Last Years, Not Months
The bin sensors run on a low-power LoRaWAN network, which is what makes the economics work. Each sensor lasts three to five years without recharge or replacement, and the devices are robust and low cost, so communications overhead stays at a minimum across a fleet of nearly a hundred units.
Smartsensor Technologies provides the bin sensors, the phone app, automatic routing for waste trucks and the waste management data platform. Meshed provides the managed network that carries it all, along with the council's other sensors and dashboards.
One Network, Many Jobs
Meshed was engaged to establish a LoRaWAN network supporting 98 bin sensors, and that network does not stop at waste. It also carries pedestrian counting sensors, GPS locators, indoor environment sensors, and temperature and tilt monitoring in the council's data centre racks.
That is the same pattern that makes waste projects worth starting at all. A network justified by one use case becomes nearly free for the next one, which is how a smart waste program quietly turns into a council-wide sensing capability. The Sydney Fish Market smart waste pilot proved the same principle on a single precinct.
A Network the Community Can Use Too
The Meshed network model uses The Things Network, a global free network server connecting LoRaWAN gateways and sensors. Everyone in the Canada Bay area within range of the council's gateways gets free access, which turns council infrastructure into a community asset and a STEM promotion tool.
Canada Bay leaned into that. The council engaged Meshed to run a community engagement workshop that brought local technology enthusiasts together to build LoRaWAN sensors and deploy them on the network. Infrastructure the community can touch tends to be infrastructure the community supports.
Collect the bins that need it. Skip the ones that do not. The data pays for the network, and the network pays for everything after.
