This Case Study from Caroline Dumortier demonstrates how Boston-based startup, Spare-it, is leveraging trash data with the OpenDataSoft platform to help organizations learn about waste management and make environmentally-conscious decisions.
What challenge is Spare-it trying to solve?
Spare-it is dedicated to helping individuals and organizations reduce their trash at home and at work. Spare-it believes that in order for individuals to reduce their consumption, they must understand precisely how much trash they throw away on a daily basis, and what their waste consists of. They have developed the first connected scale for individual trash, and their goal is to help people leverage their trash data to make environmentally-conscious decisions about what they buy, what they recycle, and what they throw away. Spare-it’s mission is to raise awareness and facilitate communication about waste management, transforming people’s behavior through data about their trash.
The Spare-it scale and its connected app helps individuals monitor what they throw away on a daily basis. Users can store and track information about the contents of their trash each day and compare their performance over time and with others.
The Spare-it smart scale connects to the user’s Wi-Fi and is simply placed under a trash can. It automatically detects when the trash weight changes, and pushes that data to the app for easy analysis and visualization.
As a key player in the Greentech ecosystem, Spare-it needed to turn the data they generate into valuable analysis and decisions. Their connected device was only the first piece of the puzzle: they needed a platform to automatically aggregate information across the organizations they work with, clean and visualize the data, and share it with end users.
Spare-it uses the OpenDataSoft data-sharing solution to help organizations share, visualize, and analyze their trash consumption
In partnership with OpenDataSoft, Spare-it launched a cloud-based platform to collect, share, visualize, and analyze waste data, all on one centralized portal. The platform provides access to waste data with a user-friendly interface. Public and private organizations can track and visualize scale data across their teams in real time so that everyone can see their trash consumption and remain goal-focused.
The OpenDataSoft platform enables Spare-it to provide the following benefits to the organizations they work with:
- One platform for all waste data from across the organization: The Spare-it smart scale pushes data in real time to its corresponding data portal. Thanks to OpenDataSoft tools, the portal automatically collects, consolidates and publishes real-time data from any sensors the organization has installed. Organizations can now see in real time how different departments and teams generate waste and adapt their management strategies accordingly.
- Accessible data with interactive visualization: The dashboard provides a one-stop view of key waste figures and trends for individual user behavior and organization-wide statistics. Authorized users from the organization can connect to the platform to consult and analyze the waste data in real time through tables, graphs and maps.
- Data sharing and diffusion: The platform also offers features to export, reuse or share trash data. The built-in API and widgets allow organizations to quickly develop new projects and services.
By embedding the OpenDataSoft solution, Spare-it now offers individuals and organizations a comprehensive waste optimization system. Users benefit not only from the Spare-it smart scale, but also from a powerful platform that makes real-time trash data easy to access, analyze, and share. This innovative package helps organizations and individuals make informed waste management decisions.
Click here to learn more about OpenDataSoft’s Data Product solution. For additional insights, check out the slides from the presentation delivered by Caroline’s colleague, Fanny Goldschmidt, at WASTE MANAGEMENT Smart Class 2018!
