Data-Driven Waste Collection in Fujisawa

♻️ Waste

📍 Fujisawa, Japan

About

Status:

✅ Finalized

Fujisawa, located in Kanagawa Prefecture near Tokyo, is a coastal city known for its quality of life and innovative urban development. It gained global attention through the Fujisawa Sustainable Smart Town project, integrating renewable energy, smart grids, and community services. With strong transport links and a focus on environmental sustainability, Fujisawa promotes resilient, citizen-centered urban planning.

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Fujisawa’s waste collection routes were set by tradition and adjusted informally, with no record of the paths, distances or times actually driven. The city needs operational data from its collection fleet to review and optimise routes, cut mileage and CO₂ emissions, and ideally to gather street-level environmental data at the same time.

Description of the Challenge

Context

Fujisawa is a coastal city of about 440,000 residents in Kanagawa Prefecture, on Sagami Bay between Tokyo and Yokohama, with a large commuting population and seasonal tourism around Enoshima and the Shonan beaches. Its refuse collection fleet travels every street in the city on a regular schedule.

Specific problem

Waste collection is predictable but costly. Routes are often set years in advance and changed informally, and they are rarely reviewed with data because the data does not exist. The city knows that a collection round was completed, but not the exact path taken, the time spent, the distance covered or where delays occurred.

Current situation and gap

Without route-level data, fuel, time and emissions costs are known only in total, not per route, so it is hard to improve collection or to check whether changes work. Garbage truck fleets are a significant source of urban emissions, and inefficient routes add unnecessary mileage and CO₂. At the same time, fine-grained air quality monitoring is expensive with fixed stations, leaving most of the city unmeasured between monitoring points.

Expected Outcomes

Specific need

The city needs continuous, per-route data on how its collection fleet actually operates, so that routing decisions can be evaluated and improved with evidence rather than experience alone.

Expected outcome

– A record of actual collection routes, distances, times and stop patterns for each round
– An evidence base for optimising routes and reducing mileage, fuel use and CO₂ emissions
– Street-level environmental data collected by the same vehicles at little extra cost
– Air quality information, such as pollen and PM2.5, shared with residents
– A sensing approach that serves both city operations and the public, making it financially practical beyond research funding

Space for Solutions and Experimentation

Fujisawa’s refuse collection vehicles cover every street on a fixed schedule, which makes them a ready-made platform for both fleet tracking and mobile environmental sensing. Instrumented vehicles can be tested in live operations without changing how collection is carried out.

The city has taken part in successive EU–Japan smart city projects, from ClouT to BigClouT, which provide a shared cloud platform and partners in Keio University’s Shonan Fujisawa Campus and NTT R&D for sensing technology, data analysis and participatory approaches.