Losing control (and liking it)

There are various ways of making your living environment cleaner and more efficient using technology, but most, if not all of them, require paying for something, installing something and usually changing your behavior. But there is something you cannot control – when does your waste gets picked up by the municipality.

There are various ways of making your morning drive more enjoyable. You can put on your favorite radio station, you can pick up a friend and talk, and you can pick up your favorite latte from the local coffee shop. But there’s one thing you cannot control – that garbage truck which seems always to get in your way just as you are in a hurry. Well, it seems you don’t always need to get control to solve your problems.

What I liked about GreenQ’s approach is that it eases the pain on both the “consumer” and the “business” side, yet it requires little to no interaction at all from both parties. The resident (consumer) does not need to buy anything, install anything, integrate anything, or change any modes of behavior to make the process work. He or she just keeps on throwing their waste to the municipality’s garbage bins as usual.

While the municipality does need to integrate some sort of technology, the field agents themselves – i.e the municipality’s employees taking care of the waste disposal – continue their daily routine. They also do not need to get to know new equipment, new methodologies, new procurement processes – they just keep on doing their job. The magic happens behind the scenes, as the analytics takes the role of manual route-planning, and optimizes the timing and routing of the garbage collection process.

The resident, in turn, gets less of the “I can’t believe that garbage truck is making me wait!” and more of the “I can’t believe how clean my street is”. Happy consumer, happy service provider – that’s a win-win situation.

Gilad Nass was one of the Managing Directors of HAC (Herzliya Accelerator Center), the Urban Tech Start Up Accelerator founded by the Herzliya (Israel) municipality to incubate and nurture ventures working within the smart city market. GreenQ participated in the 2^nd batch of the HAC program.