Land Fill Problems Can Be Solved By CLS And Cipherlab Solution

Published 29th October 2007

Waste Management is not a load of rubbish as space approved for land fill is due to run out in the next 5 to 10 years...

Concept Labelling Solutions (CLS) and its partner CipherLab have announced that CLS’ Cerium® waste management software, combined with the latest RFID technology and CipherLab’s 8300 and 9500 industrial handheld mobile computers, is helping local authorities reduce the amount of waste being disposed of via land fill sites.

“With approximately 100 million tonnes of waste being buried in ever decreasing land fill sites, the UK Government is pressing local authorities to reduce the amount of waste tipped into land fill. To meet this pressure local authorities are encouraging and implementing recycling schemes all over the UK, but it is imperative that they are able to measure just how many households are participating in these schemes and how much waste they are actually recycling,” commented Mark Stothers, Managing Director of CLS, a market leading solutions provider for all forms of automatic identification.

The CLS and CipherLab solution enables local authorities to identify each householder´s recycling wheeled bin or box, record the weight of the contents and the date and time the bin is emptied. The collected data can be used by local authorities to ascertain how well they are performing against government targets, view trends in collections and identify which households are participating and which are not.

“In order to identify which household an individual wheeled bin belongs to, local authorities are fitting them with our specifically developed RFID tags which act as a unique identifier. These can be fitted at the time of manufacture or when the bin is in situ,” explained Stothers.

“Each bin has a unique identity electronically stored in the RFID tag. At the point of delivering a new bin to the householder the Cipherlab 9500 records the unique bin reference number and associates it with the householder’s address. The collected data stored on the 9500 is then transferred to a database at the council’s HQ. Once this database is complete, the collection of the bin data becomes an automatic event, with refuse collection vehicles having on board RFID reading systems capturing the data from the bins in real time. Alternatively, the data can be captured manually using CipherLab’s 8300 handheld mobile computer,” explained Altaf Sadique, Managing Director of CipherLab UK, a global leader in the design, manufacture and marketing of AIDC (Automatic Identification and Data Capture/Collection), products and systems.

Each time the data from the individual RFID tag is collected it is uploaded to CLS’ Cerium software that then produces the relevant reports that give an audit trail from the ‘cradle to the grave’ of recycled waste per household in any given local authority area.

To date 42 local authorities have implement the joint CLS and CipherLab solution across the UK and Republic of Ireland.