✅ Finalized
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Fujisawa is a coastal city in south-central Kanagawa, Japan, with about 440,000 people. It lies on Sagami Bay between Tokyo and Yokohama, covers 69.6 square kilometres, and has a population density of about 6,300 people per square kilometre. The city is known for its commuters, seasonal tourism near Enoshima and the Shonan beaches, and Keio University’s Shonan Fujisawa Campus. Fujisawa was one of four pilot cities in the ClouT project and later joined its follow-up, BigClouT.
The ClouT Waste Management pilot aimed to lower the cost and inefficiency of city waste collection routes and make better use of the existing fleet. Fujisawa City worked with Japanese partners from the ClouT group, including NTT R&D, which developed the virtual machine running on the on-vehicle sensor boards, and Keio University. The project equipped garbage trucks with GPS and environmental sensors so the same system could improve route efficiency and monitor air quality across the city.
The main goal was to make city waste collection more efficient by using continuous position and route data from the trucks, instead of traditional routing methods. At the same time, the trucks would collect detailed environmental data for residents, making the system useful for both city operations and public information.
City waste collection is predictable but costly. Routes are often set years ahead and changed informally, but they are rarely reviewed with data because it is usually not available. Cities know when a collection round is done, but not the exact path, time spent, distance covered, or where delays happened. Without this information, it is hard to improve the process or see if changes work.
ClouT, which stands for Cloud of Things for empowering citizen involvement in smart cities, was an EU–Japan project that helped Fujisawa address these problems. The European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7, grant agreement 608641) and Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) funded the project, with each side supporting its own partners. The project ran from 1 April 2013 to 30 June 2016 in four pilot cities: Santander (Spain), Genova (Italy), Mitaka (Japan) and Fujisawa (Japan). The group included 13 partners: six from Europe and seven from Japan, including research centres, universities, large companies and city governments.
In Fujisawa’s waste management trial, the collection fleet was the main tool for improvement. These trucks are unique because they travel every street regularly, making them ideal for both improving routes and collecting environmental data. With sensors installed, the city collected route and position data to boost efficiency, along with continuous air readings for environmental monitoring. This dual benefit makes the pilot different from standard fleet tracking or typical air quality projects.
This trial was one of several ClouT field trials, which also included Fujisawa’s Surfboard and Smiley Coupon applications, Mitaka’s Paw Collection, Genova’s “I don’t risk” and Santander’s traffic and mobility management. Santander also adopted Fujisawa’s Smiley Coupon.
The pilot addressed four main challenges in city waste operations.
Collection routes were inefficient. When routes are set by tradition and changed informally, it is hard to review or improve them without knowing what actually happens during each round.
Operational data was lacking. Cities usually know that collection happened, but not the distance, duration or path. As a result, fuel, time and emissions costs are only known in total, not by individual route.
Collection has an environmental cost. Garbage truck fleets are a major source of city emissions, and inefficient routes add mileage and unnecessary CO₂.
Detailed environmental monitoring is expensive. Collecting fine-grained air quality data across a city costs a lot with fixed stations, so most areas are not measured between monitoring points.
A garbage truck fleet with sensors was used in real city operations, producing continuous per-second location data and 13 types of air readings during collection rounds.
The project created a data base for collection routing, giving the city, for the first time, a record of actual routes, distances and times. This allowed routing decisions to be evaluated with real data instead of assumptions.
A detailed street-level environmental dataset was created without extra sensing costs. It covered pollen, particulates and traffic-related gases across the whole city, not just at a few fixed points, and was shared with residents.
The project showed a dual-benefit model for city sensing. One sensor program provided both operational efficiency for the city and public information for residents. This makes the approach financially practical for a city, not just for research funding.
Fujisawa’s broader ClouT work also created the Smiley Coupon application, which was later used in Santander. This is the clearest example of a Japan-to-Europe transfer in the project, although it is a different use case from waste management.
The published sources do not report quantitative outcome figures such as the number of vehicles instrumented, mileage or fuel reductions, measured CO₂ savings, or validation of the mobile air quality readings.
What came next. The deployment lasted through two research programmes. The sensor-equipped trucks from ClouT (2013 to 2016) continued into the BigClouT project (2016 to 2019), where they were connected to a newer platform and analytics system and used with participatory incident reporting. This level of continuity is rare for a research pilot. The pilot itself is completed.
