As promised, the township has installed 30 more Bigbelly garbage receptacles, with them now located in all of Montclair’s business districts.
The municipality opted to purchase the latest batch of 150-gallon solar-powered trash compactors following the successful rollout of 40 units in the Montclair Center last February.
The new receptacles have been strategically placed in areas of high foot traffic in the Watchung Plaza, Upper Montclair, South End and Walnut Street business districts.
The solar-powered units are more efficiency than traditional trash cans since they run motorized compactors, which substantially reduce waste volumes, according to the township.
The units have up to five times the capacity of traditional trash bins, and have built-in cloud computing technology that sends out an alert when a bin needs to be emptied.
“The beauty of the Bigbelly smart waste and recycling system is that we can track and measure operations to optimize collection routines by location-based waste patterns,” Craig Brandon, Township Supervisor of Solid Waste Services, said in a statement.
“The technology has helped us minimize how often we collect waste from the bins which saves on human labor, use of our trucks and fuel. Plus, overflowing trash cans are no longer an issue with the smart bins,” he said.