Every bin, online. Every saving, measured.
Councils that moved to sensor-led rounds have published the results – Derby cut litter-bin visits by 53%. BinSense exists to get your borough its own number: baselined first, measured against your own rounds, on a network you keep.
Not ready to talk? Email me the two-page cabinet brief →
Tuesday, 06:14. The round has planned itself.
This is the operations view your duty officer opens at 06:00. Bins report themselves, the calendar round is drawn the way it runs today – then the sensor-led round is drawn over it, and you watch the miles, hours and carbon fall out of the day.
Nine bins get left in peace. Nobody pays an HGV to visit a bin that is 22% full.
In the simulation, the sensor-led round visits 9 of 18 bins and roughly halves the round’s miles, crew time and CO₂e – illustrative figures, not customer data.
Collections built on the calendar, not on need.
Today most rounds run to a fixed schedule whether a bin is empty or overflowing. That wastes fuel, crew time and vehicle life, and it shows on the street. Here is where it bites.
Every empty-bin trip is paid for
Fuel, HGV wear and crew hours are spent visiting bins that did not need emptying – exactly the avoidable spend an invest-to-save case is built on, at a time when every MTFS line is under pressure.
The rules have just changed
Simpler Recycling and packaging EPR are reopening waste budgets and service designs anyway – and fly-tipping hit 1.26 million incidents in England in 2024/25, up 9%7. Decisions are being made now, with or without data.
Carbon you can actually cut
Most UK councils have declared a climate emergency – but a declaration needs a delivery mechanism. Collection fleets burn diesel you directly control: fewer, smarter trips are measurable progress.
Overflow is what residents notice
Overflowing street bins, missed collections and fly-tipping hotspots are exactly what residents see and complain about – and what undermines a clean, green reputation.
Exhibit A – the same Tuesday, twice.
Fixed rounds vs sensor-led · one ward, 18 bins| Aspect | The calendar round | The sensor-led round |
|---|---|---|
| Bins visited | All 18, full or not | The 9 that need it – the half-empty rest are left in peace |
| Overflowing bins | Found when the schedule says so – or when a resident complains | Flagged by the bin itself before overflow; emptied before it shows on the street |
| “You never came” | Crew’s word against the caller’s | Timestamped lift record – evidence, not memory |
| Miles & diesel | The same loop, every time | Only the miles the day actually needs – the saving is measured, per round |
| Month-end picture | Anecdote, complaint counts and a fuel bill | Cost per bin serviced, missed-collection rate, miles and CO₂e – against a baseline |
| The service standard does not move: no bin is emptied less than its agreed minimum – it is emptied before it overflows, not on a calendar that misses it. | ||
One borough-owned platform, five working parts.
Not a box of gadgets from five vendors. A single, council-owned network and software stack designed so the data turns straight into action and savings.
Borough-wide LoRaWAN network
Rugged RAK Wireless gateways give long-range, low-power coverage across the borough. The network is yours: no per-device SIMs, no mobile data bills, and signal that reaches on-street, underground and estate bins alike. Designed, secured and – if you choose – operated by Secure, our group’s network division: run it in-house, keep them on it, or appoint anyone you like.
Council-owned infrastructureRugged dual-sensing bin sensors
Sonar measures fill level in real time, while an accelerometer logs the exact time and date each bin is lifted and emptied. Sealed, tamper-resistant, a 5+ year battery design life with field-replaceable cells, and fits almost any container – no mains power, no Wi-Fi.
Fill level + verified liftQR reporting on every bin
A code on the side turns residents into your eyes on the ground. A quick scan reports "overflowing", "damaged" or "fly-tipping here" with the location attached, straight onto the dashboard – no app to download.
Resident reportingDriver tablet app with smart routing
Crews get a daily optimised round that skips empty bins, with in-day alerts for overflows and fire risk. Proof-of-collection is captured automatically. It runs alongside your existing in-cab and waste-management systems with open data export – it does not have to replace them.
Optimised collectionsLive KPI dashboard
One screen for fill levels, collections made, missed bins, resident reports, response times and carbon saved. Officer and member views show the borough at a glance and prove service levels with hard data.
Evidence & transparencyWorks whichever way the service runs. In-house DSO: routes, proof and KPIs for your own crews. Contracted out: verified lifts become client-side contract-monitoring evidence for SLAs, defaults and disputes. Contractors and BIDs: the same evidence, proving your own service levels to clients.
Sense, decide, collect, prove.
The bin reports itself
Sensors send fill level and lift events over the borough’s own LoRaWAN, and residents add real-time reports by QR.
The system plans the day
Only bins that genuinely need attention enter the round, and the route is optimised around them automatically.
Crews follow the smart route
The driver tablet guides the most efficient run, re-routing live as new alerts and reports come in.
Every lift is logged
The accelerometer confirms each emptying with a timestamp, so service levels are evidenced, not assumed.
What would your number be?
Three inputs, no magic. The only assumption is the visit-reduction range other councils have published – and the whole point of the pilot is to replace that range with your own measured figure.
Councils cost a bin visit differently, so this page doesn’t invent a default. Enter your own figure and the £ band appears – leave it blank and we’ll stick to counting visits.
Assumptions, in full view: a 27–53% reduction in visits – the band published by Huntingdonshire (−27%) and Derby (−53%). Every avoided visit is HGV miles and diesel unburned; the pilot measures your exact figure. Indicative only – sources in the ledger.
Built for the street, the depot and the committee room.
No mains, no Wi-Fi, no SIM
Self-powered sensors on a council-owned network mean simple installation and no recurring connectivity bills per bin.
Fill levels in real time
Sonar gives an accurate, live read of how full each bin is, so you act on need rather than a guess or a habit.
Verified collections
Each lift is timestamped by the accelerometer. End “we were never collected” disputes and evidence SLAs with data – it protects crews against unfounded complaints, too.
Residents as your eyes
QR reporting on every bin gives the public a one-tap way to flag overflow, damage and fly-tipping, with the location attached.
Routes that skip empty bins
The driver app builds the shortest effective round each day and re-routes live, cutting miles, fuel and time at the wheel.
One dashboard, every KPI
Cost, miles, carbon, missed collections and resident response times in one place – ready for cabinet, scrutiny or a funder.
Early fire & heat warning
Add a temperature sensor to flag bins running hot before they ignite. Material Focus counted 1,200+ battery fires in UK bin lorries and waste sites in a single year – up 71%8 – mostly vapes and lithium batteries.
Recycling & usage insight
Compare general and recycling usage across wards and over time to target communications and shape policy with real evidence.
Outcomes that map to your priorities.
The figures below are drawn from comparable UK and European deployments. We baseline your area first, then measure against it, so the savings claimed end up being your own.
Lower cost 52% in one trial
A trial with BCP Council demonstrated a 52% saving in waste-management costs2; Derby cut bin visits by 53% with fill sensors on 200 litter bins1. Your own band is what the pilot measures.
Less carbon net zero
Skipping empty bins cuts vehicle miles, fuel and CO₂ directly – progress you control toward your net zero targets, reported in a format ready for your climate scorecard.
Cleaner streets fewer overflows
Acting before bins overflow keeps litter out of parks, waterways and estates, and QR reporting closes the loop with residents faster – fewer complaints reaching the ward councillor.
Leaner rounds hours back
Routes that skip empty bins hand crew hours back to the work that shows – cleansing, hotspots, fly-tip response – and help absorb driver shortages on stretched rounds.
Want these numbers moving? The 20-minute demo runs on a live dashboard – then a straight conversation about whether your borough is a fit.
Book the 20-min demoEvery number on this page, with its receipt.
Derby cut litter-bin visits by 53%. We cite it because Derby published it. Where a figure comes from a vendor’s case study, the tag says so – you should weigh it accordingly. We have not run your Tuesday yet; these councils ran theirs.
Derby City Council put predictive fill sensors on 200 hot-spot litter bins, optimised the rounds, and rolled out after the trial. Visits fell by 53%.
Council-published derby.gov.uk · June 2023 (archived)
City of Edinburgh Council runs sensors in communal and litter bins across the city – a £6.4m smart-city programme. The closest precedent for council-run smart waste at scale.
Council-published edinburgh.gov.uk
BCP Council (Bournemouth, Christchurch & Poole) trialled fill-level sensors with a UK IoT supplier, who report a 52% demonstrated saving in waste-management costs, with a named council officer quoted.
Vendor-published IoT Solutions Group
Croydon installed 80 compacting smart bins: 2,661 empties in six months against roughly 10,000 expected with conventional bins – the cabinet member noted bins had been emptied “only half or even a quarter full”.
Vendor-published Bigbelly · named councillor
Huntingdonshire District Council cut litter-bin collections by 27% in a 100-bin sensor trial (13,200 down to 9,651 collections, May–December 2020), then expanded to 360 of its 1,200 bins – rural bins included, not a hand-picked hotspot.
Vendor-published FarSite netBin, 2021 · archived copy
Prague has run 3,294 fill sensors on underground bins since 2018. Average fill at collection rose from 45% to 71% – the same trucks, doing far more useful work per mile.
Vendor-published Sensoneo
Fly-tipping in England, 2024/25: 1.26 million incidents, up 9% year on year – with clearance of the largest tips alone costing councils £19.3m. Context for why eyes-on-the-street reporting matters.
Official statistics Defra · February 2026
Battery and vape fires: over 1,200 fires in UK bin lorries and waste sites in the year to May 2024, up 71% on 2022 – 94% of surveyed councils call it an increasing challenge. Context for the optional heat sensing.
Sector research Material Focus · May 2024
Why we show competitors’ case studies: some of the best-documented results were published by other suppliers. We would rather show you tagged, checkable evidence than an anonymous “comparable borough” – and our differences (a network the borough owns, verified lifts, QR reporting on every bin) are listed where they belong: in the system, not the footnotes.
- Built around the borough’s own data. Council-owned LoRaWAN, dual-sensing bins (fill + verified lift), citizen QR reporting and route optimisation – all reporting into one platform the borough controls.
- Measured, not asserted. A baseline-and-evaluate design produces hard before/after evidence on cost, carbon and service – the format cabinet, scrutiny and finance teams expect.
- Replicable across the UK. What works in one authority is a template for its neighbours – the same statutory duties, the same budget pressures. In London alone, one borough’s evidence serves 32 more and the City.
- Aligned to your climate plan. Maps to local Climate Action Plans and net-zero scorecards – in London, the Mayor’s 2030 ambition – with carbon reported in the format your reporting already expects.
- Local benefit. Local installation and maintenance, green-collar skills, and infrastructure the borough keeps – not a SaaS that walks away with the data.
What the pilot would measure
- Cost per bin serviced baseline vs live
- Visits & vehicle miles per round ↓ counted
- Tonnes CO₂e avoided reported
- Overflow & missed-collection rate per 1,000 lifts
- Resident reports resolved time to close
- Bins serviced per crew hour ↑ tracked
- Recycling participation by ward tracked
Want this in a forwardable form? The two-page cabinet brief carries the pilot scope, the measures, the cost band and the exit terms – with every number cited, ready for your director.
Email me the cabinet briefStart small, prove it, then scale.
A phased pilot in one town centre and one estate, run alongside existing rounds with zero service risk. Fixed price, sized to sit within standard quotation thresholds, with success criteria agreed in writing before anything is installed. Scope it this quarter; evidence in time for budget setting.
Scope & baseline
Agree the pilot area, map bins, and capture today’s costs, miles and complaint data as the baseline.
Deploy
Install gateways and a starter set of sensors, fit QR codes, and stand up the driver app and dashboard.
Optimise & measure
Switch to dynamic routing, open resident reporting, and report savings and carbon against the baseline.
Scale
Borough-wide roll-out plan, plus a costed route to extend the network to new smart-borough use cases.
The risk register, written for you.
These are the objections your colleagues will raise. Here is how each one is handled – and where the commitment is written down.
If the data doesn’t beat your baseline, you walk away – sensors removed, data exported and handed over, baseline study yours to keep.
You won’t be the only one reading this.
A demo booking is a coalition decision – procurement, finance, your DPO, the unions and the members all get a say. Here is what each of them will ask, answered straight.
Procurement, week oneHow would we actually buy this?+
The pilot is fixed-price and sized to sit within standard quotation thresholds under the Procurement Act 2023, so it does not need a full tender to start. We work with your procurement team from the first conversation, and the pilot is designed to produce exactly the evidence a competitive borough-wide procurement would later need.
Finance / the s151 officerWhat’s the cost model?+
Gateways are a one-off capital item the borough owns; sensors and the platform run as a per-bin subscription. That maps cleanly onto an invest-to-save line in the MTFS: capital up front, revenue savings measured against your own baseline. The exact band for your bin count is in the cabinet brief – ask for it and we’ll send it with the workings shown.
Your DPOIs there personal data in any of this?+
Fill levels and lift events contain no personal data – they are measurements about a container. QR reports capture what the resident chooses to type plus the bin’s location; submission is anonymous by default and retention is minimal. Hosting is UK-based, we support your DPIA, and our privacy notice and sub-processor list are public.
Unions & HRIs lift data staff surveillance?+
No – and we put it in writing. Lift events evidence the service (this bin, emptied at this time), not individual performance. In practice the data most often protects crews: when a resident says “you never came”, the crew has the receipt. Rounds are co-designed with crews, not imposed by an algorithm.
MembersWill residents say we’re emptying bins less often?+
The service standard does not move: no bin is emptied less than its agreed minimum. What changes is that bins are emptied before they overflow rather than on a calendar that misses them – so what residents actually see is fewer overflows, and ward-level dashboards give members evidence to answer casework with.
OperationsWhich bins is this for – and which is it not?+
Street litter and park bins, communal estate bins (paladins and eurobins), bring sites, BID and campus bins – containers where a sensor pays for itself. It is not for household wheelie bins, where per-bin sensing is not economic and we will not pretend otherwise.
OperationsVandalism, theft, battery life?+
Sensors mount inside the lid or body, out of casual reach, with no visible value to steal. They are sealed against weather and washing, and the battery has a 5+ year design life with field-replaceable cells – replacement is a minutes-long job on the round, not a depot visit. The pilot will give you your own attrition figure – we won’t quote you someone else’s.
OperationsWe’re mid-contract with a contractor – is this still useful?+
Often more useful. As the client side, verified lifts and fill histories become contract-monitoring evidence: SLA performance, defaults and deductions argued from data rather than letters. Contractors themselves use the same evidence to prove service levels to their clients. The network is yours either way – it outlives any one waste contract.
ITDoes it integrate with Bartec, Whitespace or Alloy?+
It runs alongside them. BinSense has its own dashboard and driver app, plus open data export (API and scheduled extracts) so fill levels and lift events can flow into the in-cab and asset systems you already run. Coexistence first – nothing has to be ripped out to start a pilot.
The nightmare questionWhat happens if BinSense disappears?+
The borough keeps the LoRaWAN network – it is an open standard, not our proprietary protocol – plus the gateways, the sensors and a full export of every reading in open formats. The network layer is run as a separate specialism by Secure (part of the same group – we say so plainly), so it can be handed to your own team or any operator without touching the bins. Your infrastructure does not have any one company’s lifespan as a dependency. That is the point of council-owned.
Bins are the business case. The network is the legacy.
Once the borough owns a LoRaWAN network, it is not just for bins. The same infrastructure becomes the backbone for a genuinely smart borough – each new use case riding at marginal network cost on top of what bins already paid for. The network layer is designed, secured and – if you want – operated by Secure, our group’s network division: the borough owns the asset and chooses who runs it.
With flooding and fire risks rising in many areas, watching gullies, water levels and bin temperatures on the same network is an obvious next step.
Built by an operations team, not just a sensor vendor.
BinSense comes from the team behind i-Site, an operations and contract-management platform already used to run sensor-driven services in the field. We already use IoT sensors to manage consumables on the ground – replenished by real need rather than guesswork – and we live in dashboards, KPIs and proof-of-service every day.
That matters because the hard part of smart bins is not the hardware. It is turning a stream of readings into routes crews trust, savings finance can sign off, and evidence a committee or a funder will accept. That is exactly the gap we close.
Rostering, routing, KPIs, invoicing and client-facing dashboards already running in live service contracts.
Sensors managing real assets today, with alert thresholds, exception handling and service-level reporting built in.
Network (designed and run by our group’s network division, Secure), hardware, app and dashboard under one contract – no stitching together vendors who blame each other.
That a 20-minute demo be booked, and a measured pilot scoped against the borough’s own baseline.
Every bin, online. Every Tuesday, proven.
A 20-minute demo on a live dashboard, an indicative estimate for your bin count, and a pilot proposal with the exit terms in writing. No obligation – and if it’s not a fit, we’ll say so.
Or write to us directly: pilot@binsense.co.uk