Case Study: City of Spokane achieves paperless, optimized waste collection and major cost savings with Geotab and Rubicon

City of Spokane scraps paper records with Rubicon

The City of Spokane’s Solid Waste Collections team manages yard waste, recycling and trash for 88,000 residents with more than 100 heavy-duty vehicles and 150 staff. The operation ran almost entirely on paper—9,000 printed pages per week, two boxes of records filled weekly and off-site storage—creating high costs, time-consuming manual work and strained resources. The city needed to digitize operations to reduce costs, improve route efficiency, manage missed pickups and enhance customer communication.

Spokane deployed Geotab GO devices in each truck and RUBICONSmartCity™ on iPhones/iPads to create an integrated, paperless system. Telematics verify pickups and document curb issues, capture extra set-outs (about $2M in annual revenue), enable route optimization and billing integration, and have eliminated most printing—saving roughly $25,000 and 56 trees per year—while freeing thousands of staff hours and improving efficiency and customer service.

City of Spokane

Erica Jacobo

Senior Continuous Improvement Analyst