Can a Garbage Dumpster be “Smart”? You bet.
We’ve all seen the overflowing garbage dumpsters usually sitting semi-concealed behind a fast food franchise, your local grocer, or even that beautiful high-rise. They’re often the smelly reminder of the amount of waste that’s generated through nearly all commercial businesses. What you probably haven’t noticed over the past few years, there’s a few less bulging dumpsters these days as an innovative company called OnePlus Systems found a way to solve this problem, and converted “garbage watching” into a rapid growth revenue stream that’s attracted businesses worldwide including giants such as, HEB, Costco and Coca-Cola. They’ve carved out a unique niche for themselves, in what might be perceived as an unexciting, but necessary waste management category. Long before “Smart Phones” became mainstream, and there was no such term as the “Internet of Things (IoT)”, this innovative company saw a technological opportunity in 1991 to make waste containers “smart” – beginning with a fullness monitoring solution specifically designed for compactors.
The CultureFit team had a chance to interview Brendan Walsh, President of OnePlus Systems, to gain a better understanding of the technology they’re using to disrupt this category, the impact they made over the past few years, and what makes this a unique, and lean team of innovators, who had to learn to work together across multiple time-zones.
