If you live in the City of Syracuse, you might notice some new containers on your block – and cleaner streets too. Over the last year and a half our team in the Office of Analytics, Performance and Innovation team worked with the Department of Public Works, Communications, SYRCityline and other departments to coordinate the rollout of standardized, 96-gallon sanitation carts for City residents. Our team leveraged a data-driven approach to help facilitate the rollout and measure the success of a phased approach. Two main factors drove this project – the determination for cleaner streets in the City of Syracuse and the safety of sanitation workers. Sanitation workers historically face a higher number of workplace injuries compared to other departments’ workers. The rollout of the new sanitation carts provides an ordinance compliant cart for each resident in the City and utilizes a hydraulic arm (known as a “tipper”) newly attached to our sanitation trucks to do the heavy lifting of sanitation collection, which reduces the risk of injury to our workers.
Data Driven Rollout – what did we find when we looked?
Through a review and analysis of the City’s sanitation service from a data perspective, our team identified four key points.
First, the City incurs significant costs on two fronts: a high number of workers compensation claims from injured sanitation crews (which is four times higher than other departments) and non-residential properties which should be serviced by private haulers receiving sanitation services from the City.
Second, we found it difficult to directly measure sanitation services in the city. Instead, we used several factors to measure the current environment and then leveraged this data to show the impact of standardized sanitation carts. These factors include:
· the amount of SYRCityline requests for illegal setouts;
· trash / debris outside of properties recorded by sanitation crews;
· weight tickets from our sanitation trucks (which outweighed expectations)
· the total number of ‘slip and fall’ or ‘strain’ workers compensation claims by sanitation workers.
An Illegal Setout from early 2023
Third, no physical or digital maps existed of the current sanitation truck routes – we relied on our sanitation crew leaders and workers for navigation. We spent a significant amount of time cleaning the City’s internal data on residential addresses used by our sanitation crews which included digitally mapping each of the 15 daily routes driven by our crews and generating a list of reliable mailing addresses of residents in the city.
Thanks to this digitization and the cart distribution, we can optimize our sanitation service routes to balance distance, weight, and number of carts; and we can distribute an improved set of addresses to other departments.
Finally, the city picked up rubbish in any non-standard container, including loose bags and open top containers, which can be subject to weather and/or animals. By distributing standardized sanitation carts with lids, we addressed multiple components of this challenge:
· providing a standardized, ordinance compliant, single-issue cart to each household covered by the City;
· upgrading our sanitation trucks and carts to integrate mechanical arms to reduce the risk of injury to sanitation workers;
· identifying buildings and locations that are required by ordinance to pay for their own sanitation services (such as buildings with more than 10 residential units);
· covering garbage, reducing scattered waste and limiting additional water weight from rain and snow that gets in open containers.
Distribution of Sanitation carts
So, How Do We Do a Citywide Rollout of a New Program?
Making a change to a citywide service is a large undertaking. As outlined above, there were several data challenges we tackled, but this was the tip of what needed to change. Operations from the ground up including timing (i.e., weather), topography and housing composition all were taken into consideration as we thought through how to implement this rollout.
Ultimately, we decided to try the carts with 20% of the City to discover any potential issues that might arise before implementing throughout the whole city.
Phase One routes.
Our phased rollout began with 6,800 households. We chose them to ensure that our Phase One was representative of each day for trash pick-up, different crew leaders and different parts of the city. Before the rollout, we mailed educational information to residents of these homes as well as owners of rental occupied homes on the Phase One routes. We mapped the Phase One routes so that residents could look up if they were on a Phase One route or Phase Two route. These households received their sanitation cart(s) early in June 2023. We used the updated addresses and number of residential units for our cart delivery, determining if an address gets a cart and if so, how many.
After distribution of the carts, we measured usage and ordinance compliance with the new sanitation carts. Sanitation crews issued warnings without fines for incorrect usage with a sticker the first three weeks as a grace period to let residents know what was or was not compliant. The non-compliant warnings included violations for: over-filling the cart (it must fully close), improperly bagging trash (no loose rubbish), and/or not using the right container (bagged rubbish must be in the cart, fully closed). After the warning period, we began implementing fines. Within the first 6 weeks, we saw a 98% compliance rate with use of the carts, and among the 2% that were outside of compliance, 75% of them corrected the violation.
This resulted in an overall compliance rate of 99.5%, or only 133 fines of approximately 36,000 carts.
A typical trash day - before Sanitation Cart Rollout.
A typical trash day - after Sanitation Cart Rollout.
We were additionally able to measure other results that speak to the success of the Phase One rollout:
· Less complaints of illegal setouts coming through SYRCityline;
· Less garbage by weight collected on the Phase One route;
· Cleaner streets;
· Uptick in calls for proper setout of trash, meaning fewer illegal setouts and associated costs of compliance;
· Happier sanitation crews (according to interviews with staff);
· Zero lifting injuries associated with carts and tippers since implementation
· More accurate routes recorded.
Conclusion and Next Steps
Through lots of coordination with many departments in the city, we’ve successfully rolled out sanitation carts in Phase One. We’ve seen excellent compliance and had very positive results with the rollout, including cleaner streets and a safer work environment for the workers. Data was used throughout the process to understand and implement the rollout, as well as to measure the impact of carts on the City’s sanitation services. Compliance has been near perfect and the data we’ve seen speaks to a very beneficial new process for sanitation disposal for all involved.
Looking ahead, we will roll out sanitation carts to the rest of the city beginning Labor Day week. We will implement a longer warning period to ensure that all residents understand the new rules around using carts and have prepared many staff members in the City to handle any questions or concerns residents may have with the new cart and plan to host educational sessions throughout the City. Our crews are prepared to switch entirely over to using tippers instead of handling trash themselves, providing a safer work environment for them. Even if issues arise, we are prepared to handle them through proper data collection and the knowledge from our prior experience. With the success of sanitation carts, we are looking forward to a safer and cleaner city of Syracuse.
For more information or guidance on the new sanitation carts, please visit the City’s dedicated Cart Rollout website here: Rolling Out Trash Carts – City of Syracuse
