Project description
How smart cameras can keep cities clean
Some cities are very clean, and others are lined with litter and overflowing public trash cans. In most cities around the world, the amount of urban litter increases as the population grows. However, only a clean city is attractive and prosperous – from residents, tourism and the economy. In this context, the EU funded Clean City project will help cities improve urban cleanliness by cleaning better. Specifically, smart cameras combined with city vehicles or bicycles count litter by type, allowing city officials to target cleaning operations. For instance, monitoring can be conducted automatically by mobile phones thanks to intelligent vision algorithms. This saves on resources and also produces less CO2 emissions. Once in place, the project expects maintaining cleanliness to be cheaper compared with cleaning up.
Objective
A clean city is instrumental for the inhabitants’ wellbeing and sense of security. It creates value by increasing the city’s attractiveness for economic development and for tourism. Litter and cleaning have an impact on the environment. The cost of cleaning is estimated at 50 €/inhabitant/year or 10 to 13 billion € for Europe6. Paradoxically, according to our findings, a clean city has lower costs than a dirty one. There is a true potential to achieve higher cleanliness level at less cost. Our value proposition is a solution to improve urban cleanliness while reducing the costs and the environmental footprint of cleaning. What cannot be measured cannot be improved. We propose a timely monitoring of litter supporting the city’s investments, prevention and operations decisions. The city will allocate the cleaning means where it is necessary and engage the adequate means according to the soiling type. The monitoring is produced automatically by mobile cameras, which identify, classify and count litter thanks to intelligent vision algorithms. For a yearly fee of about 0,5 € per inhabitant, the city can significantly improve cleanliness while saving 5 € on its 50 € costs. The project has already raised genuine interest from important European cities and anti-litter organizations. Commercialization will start in Spring 2018. The fundamental critical success factor is the speed of market penetration: rapidly establish a reference panel and growth the number of customer cities. The municipalities have complex decision processes. Many hypotheses in the go-to market strategy have to be challenged in order to establish a viable plan: local offices vs distributors, collaborations and alliances, pricing. The potentially high secondary market of cleaning service providers has not been evaluated yet. It is the aim of this study to establish a success-oriented go-to market plan.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1Coordinator
1618 CHATEL ST DENIS
Switzerland
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.