I co-founded and ran a curbside composting hauler in Boulder County. I also owned the resident experience end to end: the research, the design, and the code. This is what we built, and what it changed.
Residents put a cart at the curb and never heard anything back. They didn't know what went in it, whether they were doing it right, or whether it mattered. Haulers meanwhile were eating the cost of contamination and had no way to tell the household that caused it. In Colorado, entire loads of materials end up in the landfill due to contamination.
Every hauler I looked at had the same gap: the information existed on the truck, and it died there. So I designed Clementine around one idea: for each customer, let's weigh their cart, analyze their material stream, tell the household what we found that same day, and show them their environmental impact.
The whole product is a feedback loop. Here's how it ran for a household in Erie, Colorado.
A text: tomorrow is compost day, cart at the curb by 8. Nothing to download, nothing to remember.
The cart is weighed and logged. Contamination is recorded per household — with a photo when there is any.
An impact text: pounds diverted this week, what that's worth in CO₂, and the running total since they started.
A separate text with the photo, what the item was, and one line on what to do next time. Specific, not scolding. This is the message that moved contamination.
Residents could text back a question, or a photo of an item, and get an answer. A human on our side, a conversational sorting guide on theirs.
Their own portal: next collection, weekly and all-time weights across compost, recycling and trash, impact equivalents, how they compare to other Clementine composters, supply ordering, and more.
The feedback text, with photo evidence and one thing to change. This example is from the Bluterra resident pilot in late 2020; Clementine ran the same loop for compost from 2021.
The composter portal. Every number on it came from a scale on the truck, not an estimate.
Closing the loop did what education campaigns and cart stickers never had.
"After every collection, they send me information about how much waste I collected that week and how that impacts the environment, which is really meaningful to me."
We ran the Town of Erie's own composting program across four town facilities. The same loop applied, at building scale: every collection weighed, contamination scored per location, and a year-end impact report the program manager could put in front of council.
Per-location grades turned an abstract goal into a friendly competition between Town Hall and the Community Center. That's the municipal side of behavior change — the buyer needs configurability and reporting; the person emptying the bin needs to know they're doing it right.
Town of Erie 2022 report: contamination and recommendations by facility.
Clementine's feedback loop worked because a person looked at every cart, but that doesn't scale to a municipality. Bluterra was built to put that analysis on every truck: a camera over the hopper, a model that flags contaminants at the tip, reports that go to the household and to the program manager, and a web dashboard to keep a pulse on the health of the waste stream.
One tip event from the Rumpke beta. Every item is detected and labeled by material with a confidence score; the event carries route, recycling content, coverage, and frame-quality metrics, and auto-flagging adds it to a human review queue if needed.
Hundreds of video files a day, 10-hour continuous streams or remote uploads. Cloud inference with a local YOLO fallback for 99.9% uptime.
Low-confidence and quality-issue frames are auto-flagged for review; users can flag too. Every correction goes back into the training set.
Rumpke Waste & Recycling asked for a version they could run themselves: multi-user, drag-and-drop batch upload, per-tip results with recycling-content thresholds, CSV export. We beta-tested it on their trucks with both existing camera hardware and our custom-built hardware units.
Two-minute walkthrough of the Rumpke build: upload, analysis parameters, and tip-event results. Open on YouTube if the player doesn't load.
Assisted The Recycling Partnership with material analysis of recycling carts to quantify the impact of a program intervention — both before and after intervention.
Residential recycling cart analysis for The Recycling Partnership, pre- and post-intervention.
Lasting change rarely comes from a brochure, especially when materials are constantly changing and people are constantly moving. Instead, personalized and instant feedback makes all the difference, and that is possible today — now more than ever. The hard part of a resident-facing waste product isn't the app; it's making sure the UX is streamlined and that you get the details right, every time.
And AI belongs exactly where a person can't be: on every truck, at every tip, and providing users instant help, 24/7. To build trust, these tools have to be held to a high bar — misidentify a customer or a material in their stream and credibility shatters fast.