COMPANY NAME Re-Learn
COUNTRY Italy
SECTOR Digital
CIRCULAR BUSINESS MODEL Recovery and Recycling
CHALLENGE
Urban waste management is still largely based on fixed collection schedules, manual weighing, and fragmented monitoring systems. Contamination in separate collection streams often remains invisible until waste reaches treatment facilities, where it is too late to intervene. As a result, entire loads are rejected or redirected to incineration, breaking the recycling chain. Collection vehicles follow pre-defined routes regardless of actual bin fill levels, leading to unnecessary operational costs, avoidable fuel consumption, and increased CO₂ emissions. Municipalities and waste operators lack real time visibility on what happens at street, neighborhood, and individual bin level. This makes it impossible to identify critical areas, optimize resources, or measure the effectiveness of citizen communication campaigns.
SOLUTION
NANDO.Sentinel is an advanced Computer Vision solution designed for municipalities and urban waste collection operators. The system is based on an intelligent camera installed on sentinel trucks, which during normal operations captures images along the route and automatically transforms them into structured data on waste quantity and quality, while also detecting illegal dumping and littering in public spaces. The collected data enables route optimization based on strategic parameters such as road accessibility, number and type of bins, vehicle capacity, working hours, and collection frequency, integrated with historical waste generation data. The system also enables continuous monitoring of separate collection quality at individual bin level, allowing targeted actions and evidence based communication campaigns to improve recycling performance. NANDO.Sentinel integrates with RFID technologies and existing video surveillance systems. All data is centralized in a dashboard, providing detailed indicators on disposal quality, collected volumes, number of bin emptying operations, and kilometers driven. Analysis can be performed by macro areas, neighborhoods, streets, or single bins.
Additional features include:
● Detection of illegal dumping near street containers
● On board navigation suggesting optimized routes based on historical volumes
● Tools to assess bin wear and infrastructure degradation
Through a fully data driven approach, NANDO reduces fleet management and waste treatment costs, improving operational efficiency and service sustainability. The precise measurement of waste quality and quantity also lays the foundation for future PAYT (Pay As You Throw) pricing models. The long term vision is to become a leader in Computer Vision systems for urban waste management, covering bin monitoring, eco stations, collection centers, street cleaning, illegal dumping detection, and waste control at treatment facility entry points. Collected data also powers targeted citizen communication campaigns based on objective evidence, following a “measure, educate, measure again” approach.
CIRCULAR ECONOMY STRATEGIES/BUSINESS MODEL IMPLEMENTED
NANDO.Sentinel applies a circular economy model focused on upstream quality improvement across the value chain. Increasing the purity of separate waste collection enhances the value of recovered materials and reduces rejected loads at treatment plants, keeping resources within the recycling loop instead of sending them to landfill or incineration. Granular measurement of quality and quantity also enables PAYT (Pay As You Throw) systems aligned with the European “polluter pays” principle, encouraging more responsible citizen behavior. The solution is fully scalable: it can start with a single sentinel vehicle and progressively expand across the entire urban fleet, covering street bins, eco islands, collection centers, street cleaning operations, and waste intake at treatment plants, without requiring additional infrastructure investments.
IMPACT
● Reduction of operational costs through optimized routes and collection frequency based on real waste volumes
● Decrease in kilometers traveled, fuel consumption, and CO₂ emissions
● Increased recycling rates through continuous monitoring of collection quality and targeted interventions in critical areas
● Improved urban cleanliness through proactive detection of illegal dumping near bins
● Transition from assumption based planning to fully data driven waste management with certified environmental reporting and foundations for PAYT implementation
KEY TAKEAWAY
Waste collection should no longer be a blind process. Every truck passing through the city becomes a data collection opportunity: disposal quality, waste volumes, critical areas, illegal dumping, and more. With NANDO, municipalities and operators gain full visibility on what happens in the field and can act quickly where it truly matters. The principle is simple: you cannot improve what you do not measure. Transforming collection vehicles into real time data sources with NANDO does not require new infrastructure, only a new way of understanding and managing the service.