There have been enormous advances in the computer software used by the waste and recycling industry but what about hardware and data gathering instrumentation? After all, even the most advanced software is only ever as useful as the accuracy of the information it processes.

This is especially important when it comes to weighing data. This affects fees charged for waste and recycling services, the taxes on each tonne of landfill and the revenue received for each tonne of recyclable material. Luckily, as accurate information becomes ever more important, weighing machinery is increasingly going high-tech.

“There has been a quantum leap”, says David Green, External Management Consultant at Weightron Bilanciai, a firm that specialises in developing this technology. “If you look back 15 years you wouldn’t have envisaged what is happening now. Weighing and sending that data used to be quite a convoluted process.”

Though there is a lot of on-board weighing machinery available on the market, the most commonly used on UK domestic waste trucks is a chassis system, where a block of metal bolted to the body is then mounted to the load cells (transducers used to convert a force into electrical signal) that are attached to an indicator, which reads the weight.

What is changing is the interconnection of the technology. “The weighing on the ground can now be directly sent through to an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning)”, says Green, “or any management system where you can read that data.” A crucial factor in this is the new peripheral equipment that has come into play: “Bar code scanners, blue tooth modules, cameras, PDAs – all this sort of communication equipment now can link directly into weighing systems. Operators can now go into a system, access all the records and say, ‘Well we now know that that waste has come from a particular street.’ That usability is a huge step forward.”

Some operators are taking this interconnectivity further and using a system called CAN-bus on their trucks, an electronic system that stands for Control Area Network. “It’s like an automotive equivalent of a USB”, says Mark Bottomley, Marketing Manager of on-board weighing firm Vehicle Weighing Solutions. “You’ve already got a lot of electronic equipment on a vehicle like GPS, security items, et cetera. The next step is to get all these devices talking to each other so on a chassis weighing truck you wouldn’t need to have the indicator any more. We can plug our electronics into the truck data management system so the weight can appear on the inbuilt information screen.”

The most controversial of weighing technology – at least in the UK – is a bin weighing system that uses radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology. One of the companies that supplies these is the Irish firm AMCS Group. “It uses an RFID chip that is placed on each bin”, says Chris Brown Marketing Consultant of AMCS. “The chip weighs the bin when it is being lifted up by the truck and again when it is coming down. It is pretty damn accurate. Then that information is instantly transmitted back to either the local authority or the operator that is running that service.”

Similar RFID technology is used in kerbside collections in Scandinavia as well as Ireland, where AMCS have around 85 per cent of the market and PAYT is an accepted part of the recycling landscape. In Britain, where the merest suggestion of putting chips on bins (unless tied to rewards) is enough to provoke wild tabloid headlines, charging for domestic waste collection may be off the agenda for the foreseeable future. However, don’t rule it out coming to the UK altogether. “I can definitely see it being used for amenity sites”, says Green. “People will register online and be given a card or pin number before they go to their local site. They’d take the material, it’d be weighed and charged or taken off their credits. I can see that coming, possibly within the next five years. Whether that will lead onto charging for waste collections, we’ll have to see.”

As with any new technology, once the genie is out of the bottle it is well nigh impossible to push it back in.