City of Berkeley, California, green-lights AMCS Platform to unify and modernize Zero Waste efforts

Boston, MA, United States, March 4 — Under the City of Berkeley Public Works Department, the Zero Waste Commission has signed on for the AMCS Platform to modernize and unify the entire Zero Waste operation.

Berkeley, located 10 miles northeast of San Francisco, is a densely populated city of more than 118,000 residents, is defined to a large degree, both culturally and economically, by the presence of the University of California campus located on the eastern side of the city. As such, the city prides itself on being progressive, especially as it relates to the environment.

The city’s Zero Waste philosophy adheres to the definition adopted by the Zero Waste International Alliance (ZWIA), “Zero Waste means designing and managing products and processes to systematically avoid and eliminate the volume and toxicity of waste and materials, conserve and recover all resources, and not to burn or bury them.”

Berkeley established the Zero Waste Commission to help divert waste from its landfill and maximize the benefits of recycling. In addition to the municipal Transfer Station and landfill, the commission operates a 32-truck fleet to service the community’s waste and recycling operations.

The program has been wrestling with a legacy billing and work order system, supplemented by — but not integrated with — its CRM system. Finally, after careful long-term internal and third-party evaluation of its technology needs, the existing paper-based patchwork solution was deemed outdated, inadequate, and incapable of providing even basic functionality for running a modern-day Zero Waste program.

The inefficiencies in business workflow, delayed community response times, and limited reporting and analysis have hampered efforts to manage city refuse, recycling, and organics collection effectively. In addition, the legacy tools have required heavy support from its IT staff just to maintain the system’s status quo.