Time calculation of waste collection routes: Case study from the City of Oslo

For the first time since 1992, Oslo’s household waste in 2017 was collected by The Agency for Waste Management in the City of Oslo (REN). Collections were taken over due to the contractor’s poor delivery quality; however, complaints and breaches of the working hours provisions did not disappear after the REN take-over. A new operating model requiring a new route layout was simulated to determine whether new routes exceed normal work hours. Fifty proposed waste collection routes were simulated under normal and adverse snowing conditions. 36% of the proposed exceed the 7 1/2 work-day limit under adverse conditions and will require provision for overtime use. The sensitivity analysis shows that there is an efficiency potential associated with the human, safety and ergonomics factors, and that some time drivers impact time spent considerably more than others. Based on this, we recommended that: The simulation models should be used to estimate time spent on new routes before these are implemented, as a quality assurance measure. The results should be reconciled against working hours. The new routes should be simulated successively as new routes are proposed since changes to one route’s time drivers will have consequences for adjoining routes. The various data sources should be reviewed with a view to registering or coding information in a way that makes it easy to extract information linked to the individual route across data sources. REN should clarify a new working hours model for the waste collectors before the new route layout is designed.