M2M has enabled recycling and disposal company LondonWaste to kill several birds with one stone.

The firm, which provides services for the North London Waste Authority (NLWA), a consortium of seven London boroughs, is using Orange’s FleetLink system to track the positioning of its recently acquired fleet of 35 lorries.

The FleetLink device in each lorry is connected via GSM to a central location, which means that if a lorry is stolen it can be immobilised remotely.

Each device is also equipped with GPS to map the exact position of each vehicle, and this information enables the central tracking of each vehicle’s location.

‘You can get a list of all the points every time a lorry passes an Orange mast, and you can import that information into mapping software so that you can see where the driver has been in the course of the day,’ says Mark Beattie, head of IT at LondonWaste.

The mapping facility has provided several benefits for the company, in terms of both efficiency and compliance.

‘We have a facility at Hornsey Street that requires us to compact all the waste before the trucks take it to Edmonton for shredding and incineration or directly to landfill,’ says Beattie.

‘Because there is limited capacity for storage on-site, knowing where the vehicles are, how long they are taking at landfill and how long before the next one comes back is important.’

The device also works as a hands-free mobile phone, so the central office can redirect any vehicle to the Hornsey Street site when necessary.

The London Lorry Ban forbids trucks travelling on certain routes. Lorries found on the banned routes can be fined. ‘What we were able to do with FleetLink was designate the routes within their software,’ says Beattie.

‘If the drivers go off those routes an alarm is generated, so that we know they have gone off the route.’

In cases where LondonWaste disputes a fine, the firm can prove exactly where its trucks were on the day in question.

FleetLink can make sure that the company complies with the European Working Time directive by enabling the head office to check that each driver has had the statutory amount of rest.

M2M technology has also helped in the management of waste disposal, says Beattie, because silos at the company’s Edmonton site have to be emptied on a regular basis.

‘We have put an Orange Sim card into clever telemetry hardware which links the silo weight information to the internet, so our disposal organisations can see how much weight there is in each of the silos,’ he says.

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