Rubicon announces that the City of Fort Smith, Arkansas has selected Rubicon® to formally implement a smart city solution to help improve residential and commercial waste and recycling services across the city. The City of Fort Smith’s goal is to enhance its municipal solid waste, recycling, and yard waste offerings, both in terms of sustainability and customer service, through the integration of Rubicon’s technology. The City of Fort Smith will pilot the RUBICONSmartCity™ platform for six months. The second-largest city in Arkansas, Fort Smith boasts nearly 90,000 residents and a landfill that serves up to 300,000 residents of the surrounding multi-county region. The City has over 40 sanitation vehicles providing residential, commercial, and roll-off collection services for roughly 32,000 locations, all of which will be part of the RUBICONSmartCity launch.
The RUBICONSmartCity platform includes a smartphone-based mobile app, a plug-in device, and a web-based portal. The technology will allow the City of Fort Smith’sDepartment of Sanitation to collect real-time service confirmations, provide GPS vehicle tracking, and enable the documentation of driver issues, including the inability to successfully complete a pick-up. The RUBICONSmartCity manager portal will collect data and analytics, providing the city with real-time route updates, daily reporting, and operational insights, leading to more efficient operations and ultimately improved service for its customers and citizens. Rubicon’s technology will be installed across the City’s entire waste and recycling fleet.
“Rubicon is remaking the entire landscape of waste and recycling through innovative technology and data analysis that helps cities of all sizes make smarter decisions about their waste, recycling, and overall city operations,” said Michael Allegretti, Chief Strategy Officer at Rubicon. “Using RUBICONSmartCity, the City of Fort Smith will be able to leverage data collected from its fleet using a phone and pod-device in real time to plan optimized routes, track vehicle locations, and confirm service at every location, ensuring that Fort Smith continues to realize measurable gains in terms of quality of life, customer service, and taxpayer savings.”
The City of Fort Smith, Arkansas has been outspoken in pushing sustainable solutions for its businesses and residents. In the past few years, the City has formed a Recycling Advisory Committee made up of both city members and citizens, and its ‘Keep Fort Smith Beautiful’ campaign has been supported by the Sebastian County Regional Solid Waste Management District.
“This literally takes us from managing with paper and pencil into the twenty-first century, smartly managing our resources and operations across our city,” said Kyle Foreman, director of Sanitation for the City of Fort Smith. “Implementing Rubicon’s smart city solution across our fleet means we’re connecting every vehicle and driver with Operations Management at all times. Operations will be able to redirect our resources where they’re needed when they’re needed, and we expect that to result in significant operational savings,” Foreman said.
“These savings—the stretching of our precious budget dollars,” added Carl E. Geffken, City Administrator, “will help us do more with less. We believe we’ll serve our customers better, that our sanitation vehicles will last longer, we’ll save on fuel… There are a number of benefits. Bottom line is we expect this smart city solution will help us effectively do more with less. That saves our residents money in the long run.”
For more information, visit https://www.rubicon.com/smart-city/.
