Curbside dumping costs councils up to $750,000 a year to clean up. The fix isn't more rangers, it's getting signal out of the cameras you're already paying for.
How we turned a council's existing garbage truck cameras into an automated curbside dumping detection system.
Cleanup Cost Exposure
Up to $750K
Annual curbside dumping spend addressed
Detection Source
Existing Trucks
No new hardware, no new routes
Response Time
Sharply Reduced
From weeks of reports to next-route pickup
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Curbside dumping, the piles of household rubbish and mattresses people leave on the street outside scheduled pickup, is a chronic problem for local councils. Cleanup alone can run up to $750,000 a year, on top of damage to infrastructure and the environment. For this council, the operational pain was worse than the dollar figure. Regular waste trucks couldn't collect the dumped piles because they weren't on the route sheet. A separate manual dispatch service handled them, but only after someone reported the dump, which meant rangers and residents were the detection layer. Reports could take weeks to surface, dispatch ran reactively instead of being route and load optimized, and by the time a truck arrived, the pile was usually bigger.
Blackbook AI built a computer vision model on top of the cameras the council's garbage trucks already carry. We trained the model on an annotated dataset drawn from historical footage from smart-enabled trucks and in-cab triggers, so it learned to recognize rubbish piles and mattresses in real curbside conditions, not staged ones. As the trucks run their normal routes, the model processes the camera feed and uses the truck's GPS and GNSS data to triangulate the exact location of each detected pile. An API then pushes those detections back to the council as street addresses ready for pickup. No new vehicles, no new routes, no new reporting burden on rangers or residents. The trucks that are already on every street every week become the detection network.
From Robbie's desk
A short, no-fluff read from our VP of Growth on the bottlenecks worth watching, the AI execution patterns that are actually shipping, and the numbers behind them.
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Recruitment
Processing Time
< 5 Mins
Emergency Services
Auto-Cleared
60%
Retail
Payback Period
< 1 Month
Most consultancies want to sell you a 12-month transformation roadmap. We don't. Every engagement starts with a blunt 15-minute operational review directly with our VP of Growth. We look at your bottleneck, work out where it's actually breaking, and tell you if an AI execution path makes sense. No pitches. Just operator to operator.