Street Smart: The City of Montgomery, Alabama
Welcome to Street Smart, an interview series from Rubicon in which we sit down with a key city official from one of our smart cities to talk about their city, their commitment to sustainability, and how they’re collaborating with us in our mission to end waste.
Rubicon at WASTECON 2019
This week I am at WASTECON in sunny Phoenix, Arizona alongside my Rubicon colleagues on the Smart City team, Tyler Molinaro and Geoffrey Urbach.
RUBICONSmartCity at Public Works Expo (PWX)
Last week my Rubicon colleague Tyler Molinaro and I were at Public Works Expo (PWX) in Seattle, Washington; the largest conference of its type in the United States, and a great opportunity for public works professionals to meet with innovators in this space.
RUBICONSmartCity at the Smart and Secure Cities and Communities Challenge Expo
I recently spoke at the Global City Teams Challenge (GCTC) Smart and Secure Cities and Communities Challenge (SC3) Expo in Washington, D.C. about how public-private partnerships can support a city’s transportation infrastructure—and how RUBICONSmartCity™ is leading the way in making this happen.
Smart Cities are Proactive, Not Reactive
Last week I spoke at Government Fleet Expo & Conference (GFX) in New Orleans about how cities can leverage their municipal fleets in previously unimaginable ways to transform themselves into smart cities.
WasteExpo: Demonstrating Rubicon’s Technology
Recently I was at WasteExpo, the largest annual gathering of the American waste and recycling industry, along with a number of my Rubicon colleagues. (Here’s a WasteExpo roundup from our organics and food waste lead, Ryan Cooper).
For our procurement team on the ground with me at WasteExpo, it was an exciting opportunity to meet with haulers with whom we already work from around the world, as well as some with whom we hope to work in the coming days. The waste and recycling industry in the United States was started by family-run businesses, and it has never lost its close sense of community. WasteExpo always drives that home for me; it’s always fun to run into people I typically get to see only once a year at this very conference!
If you missed WasteExpo 2019, here’s a brief rundown of my demonstration of some of Rubicon’s technology, along with some of my own observations from the event.
RUBICONPro and RUBICONSmartCity Demo
During the expo I demonstrated our RUBICONPro™ and RUBICONSmartCity™ technology, which consists of an in-truck device for haulers that sits on the truck dashboard providing drivers with route details, navigation, and alerts while collecting real-time service information, vehicle tracking, and safety metrics.
One of the core features of our technology is its route management capabilities, which gives haulers the optimal driving route in real-time to reduce idle time and fuel burn to improve driver efficiencies.
While all data and metrics collected by devices running RUBICONPro and RUBICONSmartCity are processed on the device in real-time without needing to be uploaded to a server (this allows waste and recycling customers to receive service confirmations in real-time), the technology also comes with a portal that works as one seamless system to help you manage your entire fleet.
While demonstrating RUBICONPro and RUBICONSmartCity, the four features in particular that I wanted to make sure I communicated to our current and future partners were:
- Service Confirmation: Automatic, real time service confirmations with an ability to flag issues and take pictures along the way.
- Vehicle Tracking: Historical breadcrumb trails of a vehicle’s routes, showing service confirmations and more.
- Actionable Insights: Actionable fleet insights that give operational updates to aid in continuous improvement.
- Driver Behavior Matrix: Compare top performers to bottom performers with data on speeding, hard driving, stationary time, and more.
Rubicon Buyer Program
At WasteExpo I was also excited to talk with haulers about RUBICONSelect™, the Rubicon program that harnesses the buying power of Rubicon to make it easier for independent haulers to compete by offering access to exclusive discounts on everything from tires to fuel and containers to insurance to be a more competitive business.
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I had a great time showcasing Rubicon’s technology, buyer program, and hauler network at WasteExpo this year. If you have any questions for me or the rest of the Rubicon tech team, or you would like to deploy RUBICONPro or RUBICONSmartCity technology in your fleet, please drop me a line at samantha.podgorny@rubiconglobal.com.
Sam Podgorny is Director of Technology Business Development at Rubicon. To stay ahead of Rubicon’s announcements of new partnerships and collaborations around the world, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, or contact us today.
Here’s What a RUBICONSmartCity Rollout Looks Like in Practice
Last month I was down in Irving, Texas working alongside our Smart City launch leads Sam Emengini and Kevin Malinowski to help deploy RUBICONSmartCity™ in their fleet of 40 waste and recycling collection vehicles that service approximately 42,000 residential and commercial locations across the city.
How Smart Cities Can Reduce the Government Procurement Timeline
Here at Rubicon, we recently announced our smart city partnership with HGACBuy, a government procurement service striving to make the governmental procurement process more efficient.
Smart Cities Connect Spring Conference and Expo: Looking Back and Looking Ahead
I recently moderated a panel at the Smart Cities Connect Spring Conference and Expo on the topic of “Getting Smart About Trash.”
Rubicon’s Partnership with Japan’s Odakyu Group a Sign of Exciting Collaborations to Come
Waste is a global problem and it is for this reason that Rubicon’s mission to end waste, in all of its forms is not only a global challenge, but a global opportunity.
We recently announced our partnership with Odakyu Group, out of Tokyo, Japan. Founded in 1948, Odakyu is committed to working collaboratively with local Japanese haulers and industry leaders to help identify and solve the local and global challenges of waste today.
Doing business in Japan can be challenging for foreign companies that are not acquainted with local customs and traditions. Working with Monitor Deloitte Japan, Odakyu invited me and Rubicon’s Vice President of Sustainability, David Rachelson, to their headquarters in Shinjuku, Tokyo with the view of forming a potential partnership—stating that they view Rubicon as a global leader in the waste and recycling space committed to delivering a Circular Economy.
Rubicon and Odakyu
By partnering with Rubicon, Odakyu will utilize Rubicon’s technology to help develop a sustainable ecosystem for all of its operating businesses. Of course, Japan has long been known for taking innovative approaches to sustainability. In 2018, The Japan Times reported that the country was eyeing the potential of reducing its plastic waste by as much as 25 percent by 2030, while just last month it was reported that the Japanese village of Kamikatsu had reached an 81 percent recycling rate—and it aims to be the first zero-waste municipality in the world by 2020. It was also recently announced that Japan will achieve its goal of making the 2020 Summer Olympic medals, of which Tokyo is the host, entirely from e-waste.
At the World Circular Economy Forum in Yokohama, Japan last year, Japan’s State Minister of the Environment, Tsukasa Akimoto, pledged that Japan will advance the circular economy when they take up the presidency of the G20 (Group of Twenty) this year. In a video address to attendees at the forum, the Prime Minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, noted that his country wished to “share its experience of natural resource conservation and take the lead on [the] circular economy within the international community.”
Rubicon is a software company that follows a strong environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria. It was clear that this was top of mind for my counterparts at Odakyu Group while we were working to make this partnership happen. Operationally, Odakyu will be using our technology to help the hauling community in Japan improve operational efficiency and identify new business opportunities, while at the same time doing their part toward advancing the global circular economy and creating shared value for all involved.
If you would like to talk about future global opportunities with Rubicon, please reach out to me at renaud.devielcastel@rubicon.com.
Renaud de Viel Castel is Senior Vice President of Global Expansion at Rubicon. To stay ahead of Rubicon’s announcements of new partnerships and collaborations around the world, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, or contact us today.
