Being a bit of a Luddite, I’m always wary of new technology (I know, not ideal in the fast-paced waste industry), so the thought of meeting robots that have replaced waste operatives in a new hospital filled me with mixed emotions.

The £430-million Brunel building, the newest addition to Bristol’s large Southmead Hospital, opened in May 2014, and is already breaking new ground. Indeed, 158
800-litre (L) standard and dual-stream bins and 12 high-tech automated guided vehicles are now transporting waste, linen, food, consumables, certain pharmaceuticals and instrumentation around the hospital.

Walking into the new hospital – designed like an airport, complete with ‘check-in’ points and patient ‘gates’ – one cannot help but feel a bit awed by its size and technology. I am here to find out about the building’s automated guided vehicles (AGVs) and half expect to see them whizzing around, but quickly learn that they are restricted to the clinical side of the building and service areas.

Esther Coffin-Smith, Sustainable Development Manager of North Bristol NHS Trust, shows me around with enthusiasm, noting my amused reaction to the ‘robots’ telling me to pay attention to the ‘automatic transport’: “People like to just stop and watch them go past. It has been interesting to see people’s reactions. They have labels on top of them that say ‘do not stand on these’ as you can imagine it is very tempting, as they are moving along, to do the ‘surf board’ thing… but if you did it in transit, the AGV would just stop.”

Moreover, it seems that people can’t help but interact with the machines and there have even been requests for them to be “reprogrammed with a Bristolian accent”, Coffin-Smith jokes. (While I’m there, I witness a cleaner putting a ‘Wet floor’ sign on an AGV and laugh at the resulting robotic warning.)

The decision to install Swisslog’s TransCar AGVs in the new building was made around seven years ago, Coffin-Smith explains, when the planners were considering goods and consignment flows, including waste management. The technology was developed in Germany in 1963, and has been used in hospitals in Europe since the ’60s. However, Southmead wanted to create a complete system where AGVs and bins were integrated (rather than have AGVs tow bins, as is the case in other hospitals) and this is where they had to get creative. The hospital approached its bin supplier Taylor to create a metal container to sit atop the TransCar, flush with its edges. With space at a premium, it also needed to enable the segregation of three waste streams at any one time within the 49 disposal holds in the new building.

Clive Pearson, Taylor’s Marketing, Commercial & Customer Services Manager, explains: “We needed to make something that was a completely different size. Anyone in the waste industry would look at it and go: ‘I know that’s a bin, but nothing like I’ve seen before’.”

After considering “the parameters that were needed from a health and safety point of view, from a manufacturer’s point of view, from a tolerance point of view” as well as the client’s requirements, Taylor came up with two new bins: a split-lid Duo Bin to enable the collection of two waste streams within one footprint, and a smaller version of its standard container. “The bins and the bin components are tested to various standards to ensure they meet EN840 standards. We are the only company in the UK that has a testing facility where we can test everything”, explains Pearson. Moreover, the bins’ metallic material allows for the use of a magnetic labelling system based on three colour-coded A4 posters: black for landfill waste; blue for recyclables; and yellow for offensive waste. Certain waste streams are also moved in AGV-compatible cages, although the Southmead team and their clinical waste provider couldn’t find a way to make the AGVs compatible with clinical bins, as these have to be taken off site for disinfection.

Once staff have emptied bins and moved the black sacks or clear recycling sacks to a disposal hold, it’s time for the AGVs to shine. A porter will place the full waste bins (or cages for cardboard) in a ‘send and receive bay’ in the disposal holds, line it up with the rails on the floor, place the card corresponding with the hold in the reader, press the button, then leave it to be collected. The AGVs take over from there.

The AGVs are able to move around every floor of the seven-storey building by using their own lifts. Through Wi-Fi, the AGVs call lifts to the appropriate floor: “If you’re in a lift when an AGV wants to use it, you get turfed out – but this is necessary because they have a timetable to work to, we don’t want them being held up, and there are plenty of other lifts that people can use. People soon realise that it’s quicker if they don’t go in these lifts because they might have their journey hijacked”, Coffin-Smith tells me.

Of course, even AGVs need a rest once in a while – well, after 3,900 metres (or at 28 per cent charge). At this point, they take themselves to charging bays, where it takes just 25 minutes for a full charge.

Coffin-Smith is currently working out the speed at which the bins in different areas are being filled, to know when they need emptying: “To begin with, we investigated how quickly certain bins filled up and found that there were some at the furthest ends of the building that only needed to be emptied once a day, sometimes even every other day. That dictates the timetable.”

Despite the advance in technology, there have been some issues, including realising the best way to arrange things and ensuring corridors are kept clear. There have also been a number a problems with doors, requiring a “huge education programme” to sort out the kinks.

Door education? Indeed, with staff used to pushing doors open, they have been breaking doors by being too forceful, meaning they won’t open automatically for AGVs. It’s made more complicated as some doors are automatic, and some still require manual pushing, “so there has been a whole host of education on how to use doors”, Coffin-Smith explains.

And it’s education that’s ongoing. While I’m there, we spot an AGV stuck outside a door. Moments later, a Swisslog engineer, back to sort out a few teething problems, comes to fix it and finds that the door system has been turned off. The reason? No one knows. “There are some doors that just seem to break frequently and unless they are propped open, which you couldn’t do with a fire door, then the AGV can’t get through.” There’s an on-site engineer trained in anything that could go wrong with the system, but Coffin-Smith aims to get to a point where “they don’t need rescuing from anything but a technical issue”.

The carts cost £477,000, but Coffin-Smith believes it is well worth it: “All of the AGV compatible bins, cages and carts have had to be specially made, so it’s quite an investment, but they will last us a long time and it’s offset against the cost of not needing staff to physically move things… Once the porters’ time has been freed up thanks to the AGVs, then they are able to do things like moving beds and taking people in wheelchairs, rather than doing the avoidable, heavy lifting and shifting of product and waste… [It also protects] the building’s fabric – because AGVs don’t drive things into the walls/doors whereas staff can.”

Pearson tells me that Taylor is currently in discussion about providing similar systems to three other UK hospitals at present: “It’s an innovative solution to
issues that hospitals face in terms of moving items around the hospital and allows them to be far more efficient.”