Sam Dietrich, co-founder of Prairie Robotics Inc., presents his company's computer and AI system which estimates the type and amount of trash in vehicles as part of an Innovation Saskatchewan competition on Feb. 11, 2020. (Lisa Schick/980 CJME)

By Lisa Schick/CJME News Staff

Technologies unveiled to help track, ultimately reduce, garbage in Saskatchewan

Feb 11, 2020 | 5:48 PM

People in Saskatchewan produce a lot of garbage and on Tuesday, Innovation Saskatchewan unveiled two technologies which it hopes will get the province on track to reduce that amount of trash.

Last year, Innovation Saskatchewan put out a problem to the tech community: How to measure solid waste and track where it’s going in the province.

Proponents put forward their ideas and Innovation Saskatchewan picked two — and now their technologies have been revealed.

Saskatchewan has the second-highest amount of trash thrown out per capita in Canada, second only to Alberta. The provincial government has made reducing that number a priority.

Sam Dietrich, a co-founder of Prairie Robotics Inc., explained it’s important to classify and measure solid waste.

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“It’s important for us in Saskatchewan, and across the country, to better understand the amount of waste we’re disposing of so that we can make great targets and actually properly reduce it,” said Dietrich.

His company developed a camera and AI system with machine learning which estimates the amount and type of waste going into landfills. Prairie Robotics came up with the solution because it has a history of using AI and image classification.

“It just seemed like an appropriate use case for it based on the fact that to install a weigh scale at landfills across the province is very costly, while installing cameras and a computer is very low cost, and you can get similar accuracies,” explained Dietrich.

He said that, for landfills which don’t have weigh scales and don’t know what has come in, it can be difficult to develop recycling and diversion programs.

“So by properly understanding the types and the weight of waste coming into our landfills, we can better understand how we can reduce that,” he said.

Dietrich said his company was able to use a lot of data from the City of Regina’s landfill sites and went through tens of thousands of images individually.

The other technology that got a grant from the province was developed by a group of researchers at the University of Regina, headed by professor Kelvin Ng.

The group developed a low-cost sensor which can measure the weight of a moving vehicle and which can still work in Saskatchewan’s harsh weather conditions.

“The whole idea is that we want to measure the weight of the vehicle before entering the waste facility (and after), such that we can actually estimate the total amount of waste materials that are disposed of in the landfill sites or any other type of waste facilities,” explained Ng.

Ng said there were a lot of challenges his group had to overcome in the development, including Saskatchewan’s extreme cold.

Ng explained his technology isn’t ready to use yet but he hopes to have acquired the research partners needed by the end of the year to take the project to the next level.

Dietrich said his project isn’t quite ready to implement yet, but it is in the piloting phase. He said it could be ready to go in the summer.

This is the third competition put on by Innovation Saskatchewan. Both the winners in this case got $10,000 and a 16-week residency to develop their projects with the government.