At Monday's meeting, the Prague City Council approved a new agreement with the Operátor ICT on ensuring the administration and development of a sensor network for monitoring the occupancy level of sorted waste containers in the streets of the metropolis and a framework agreement on the development of this sensor network. The municipal company Operátor ICT, in cooperation with the Municipal Department of Environmental Protection, will provide sensor network management for Prague, process and visualize the collected data and provide its basic service support. This is another step towards building and operating a comprehensive tool for monitoring and optimizing the collection of sorted waste, which will be tailor-made for the capital.
The approved framework agreement follows the implemented pilot project Smart Collection of Waste, thanks to which more than 420 sensors were installed in Prague, mainly in underground containers for sorted waste. Up-to-date data with information on the actual occupancy of individual containers was then available to the city districts involved in the project, as well as to all Prague citizens via the My Prague application.
"After evaluating the pilot project, which was awarded a prestigious award, we decided to gradually implement a nationwide system for monitoring the collection of sorted waste. With the help of installed sensors, the city wants to monitor the real filling of collection containers before collection and optimize its expenses associated with providing this service. From a financial point of view, it is therefore an investment, the purpose of which is to reduce the city's operating costs. Annual savings, after deducting operating and investment costs, are immediately invested in the development of the existing collection network. The greatest potential for possible savings is expected especially in the collection of containers for glass, beverage cartons and metal packaging," says the mayor of Prague Zdeněk Hřib about the approved framework agreement.
"We will also help the environment with lower emissions from collection vehicles, so with this project the capital also wants to contribute to meeting our climate goals. In these, we have set ourselves to reduce CO2 emissions by 45 percent by 2030 and become a completely carbon-neutral city by 2050. We are now publishing one of the key strategies of Circular Prague 2030, which will lead Prague to significantly reduce the consumption of primary raw materials, waste production and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The strategy of Circular Prague 2030 follows the Climate Plan of Prague until 2030," Petr Hlubuček, the Deputy Mayor of the Capital City of Prague for the Department of Environment describes.
"We are pleased to be able to manage and develop a container occupancy monitoring network for the capital city. This is fully part of the Smart Prague concept, which has defined responsible and intelligent waste management as one of its goals by 2030. In addition, we will expand the services of our Golemio BI data application, especially the functionality of the data display software tool, as part of an agreement approved by the City Council. It is the clear data concerning the fullness of containers for sorted waste that the city serves as a valuable basis for the subsequent evaluation of the city’s municipal waste management system associated with monitoring the utilization of specific separated waste sites," Michal Fišer, CEO of the Operátor ICT adds.
The Smart Collection of Waste project has also received several professional awards, for example in the third year of the Smart Cities for the Future national competition, where it placed first in the Smart City 2019 category with over 200,000 inhabitants. Smart collection of waste attracted the attention of the expert jury mainly thanks to the use of the most modern technologies in the field of urban waste management.
"Thanks to the council's decision, our Smart Collection of Waste project will expand to more than 6,000 separate waste collection containers, making it one of our most successful innovative projects ever. Thanks to the smart collection of waste, it will be possible to operatively adjust the collection frequency, both in the case of overfilling of collection containers and in the event that the set collection frequency is oversized for the monitored containers. We are convinced that quality monitoring of waste collection has a significant potential to substantially improve the quality of services provided to the public," Matěj Šandor, Deputy Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Operátor ICT concludes.
