Opto Africa Supplies Innovative Technology for Managing Waste Landfills

Opto Africa, a South African-based Channel Partner founded in 1997, has used Wavetrend’s active tags and readers as part of its solution to enable Pikitup Johannesburg to dramatically improve the efficiency of its management of the City’s waste landfill sites.

Pikitup required a robust, scalable solution that would enable its management to collect precise information on the amount and type of refuse being conveyed over weigh-bridges by its waste fleet to the landfill sites, thus complying with environmental mandates and improving the efficiency of its invoicing.

By fitting a Wavetrend active RFID tag to each of the 450 waste vehicles, Opto Africa was able to uniquely identify each vehicle when these were read by Wavetrend tag readers installed at the weigh-bridges. This data is then uploaded to Opto Africa’s e-Box, a versatile communications unit which captures data on the vehicle and its loaded/unloaded mass, the type of waste load, the driver and the date and time.

This is then relayed to a hosting environment over the cellular GPRS network so that Pikitup’s management can view activity reports remotely over the internet. Not only has the system provided Pikitup with real time accurate data and enabled it to improve the accuracy of its billing systems, so reducing payment delays, but it has also cut the average turn around time of a landfill transaction from 40 to 25 minutes.

Chris Bishop, Chief Executive Officer of Wavetrend, commented: “Wavetrend is delighted to be associated with a project of this scope and magnitude. The solution has significantly improved Pikitup’s operational efficiency and reduced its payment times. It should be of interest to all industrial users of weigh-bridges such as, for example, the mining industry.