00:19:26 · Neil C. Hughes
[00:19:26] S0: Wow. I'm curious. How do you decide which of those routes, depots or vehicle types are are ready for electrification and which are not? I suspect we'll have people listening from all across The US and around the world. Do you make that decision like that?
00:19:40 · Brett Rogers
[00:19:40] S1: Yeah. The first thing we did when we decided, hey. What vehicles to go after first is vehicle type. So in our industry, we basically have three different vehicle types. We have our residential vehicles. So those are the vehicles with that arm on the side of the truck, and they go through your neighborhoods and then pick up the cans in front of houses. So that's our residential trucks. And then we have our small container commercial trucks. Those are the ones with the front forks, and they're picking up cans that are in front of companies, and they're picking up maybe a 100, 120 cans a day, where our residential trucks are picking up more like a thousand cans a day. And then our third type of vehicle are our roll off trucks for our industrial large containers. And so these are, like, the really large containers you see at, you know, a construction site. And so we may pick up, like, six of those a day. And so you have a huge different type of duty cycle between a thousand lifts, you know, a 100, 120 lifts, and six lifts a day. And what we've noticed is when we first entered the space, everyone's like, oh, we should go electrify that one that only does six lifts. Yeah. But that's the wrong way to look at it because what you're missing is the actual drive cycle. And where EVs are most beneficial are in that stop and go driving because you get the regenerative braking system. And so the reality is the best vehicles to electrify are the ones doing the 1,000 stops because those 1,000 stops are potential to regen that electricity in order to increase efficiency. And so that's where EVs really shine. And so what we've actually done is focused on those large number of stops, that duty cycle that requires a ton of stop and go driving, a ton of city driving, those are the best ones for EVs. And it turns out those are the worst ones for diesels from an efficiency perspective. So there's a good trade off there in order to increase our efficiency with EVs. So we first started with the line of business, which the best one for us is the residential, which is a thousand stops a day. The next one would be the front load, which is around a 100, 120 stops a day. And the hardest applications for EVs, because it's mainly just deadhead miles, is the roll off truck, which is only six lifts.
00:21:46 · Brett Rogers, Neil C. Hughes
So we started there, and then we did a route analysis to really understand how long are all these routes across the country, across our business, and understand, hey. Where should we go first? Because when we launch a new technology, we want the highest success rate. So, yeah, we're gonna intentionally go out and pick the shorter routes, the one with lower lifts, in order to make sure that technology works. And then we get the vehicles out there, collect more data, update our models, and then expand over time. Like I mentioned before, we're really excited about the performance, and they're able to basically perform across the country in almost all of our duty cycles we put them through. And so we've already started rolling out our front load trucks now with those commercial containers, and we expect to have some more of our roll offs just trickling in maybe the end of this year or early next year. [00:22:36] S0: I was gonna say the pace of technological change is showing no no indication of slowing down. If anything, it seems to be speeding up right now. And as a company, I would imagine, as your operational technology footprint, as that continues to increase, there'll be recruitment strategies around that required. So as we're literally a couple of months away from life in 2027, where do you go from here? What what is your big focus now?
00:22:36 · Neil C. Hughes, Brett Rogers
[00:22:36] S0: I was gonna say the pace of technological change is showing no no indication of slowing down. If anything, it seems to be speeding up right now. And as a company, I would imagine, as your operational technology footprint, as that continues to increase, there'll be recruitment strategies around that required. So as we're literally a couple of months away from life in 2027, where do you go from here? What what is your big focus now? [00:23:01] S1: Yeah. The big focus is really increase our safety technology, increase our technology that gives visibility to our cities, but as well as optimize routing. From Republic Services, what you're gonna see is a huge push in really leveraging AI and advanced tools to make our business more efficient, and we do that through routing. And that's gonna be a big driver next year, and we'll see more and more coming out of there. [00:23:27] S0: Awesome. Well, I'll be watching you very closely. And as Brett, for anyone wanting to find out more about Republic Services, everything that you're doing, how they can get involved, where should they go? [00:23:36] S1: Yeah. The best place to go is republicservices.com. And, if you wanna get synced up with me, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn.
00:23:36 · Brett Rogers, Neil C. Hughes
[00:23:36] S1: Yeah. The best place to go is republicservices.com. And, if you wanna get synced up with me, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn. [00:23:43] S0: Awesome. I'll have links to absolutely everything, and I'll try and include a lot of information around some of the things we talked about and the successes that you're having. And I do encourage you to connect with Brett and the team there. But more than anything, Brett, thank you for bringing all this to life in a language everyone can understand. Really enjoyed it. [00:23:59] S1: Yeah. Thanks for bringing me on. Appreciate it.
00:24:00 · Neil C. Hughes
[00:24:00] S0: So many big takeaways here. I can't stop thinking about just how much of this work happens around the vehicle, An electric truck that just needs a suitable route, charging, and a driver who can trust it. A safety alert needs to be understandable in the moment with coaching behind it when a pattern needs attention because those buzzers and beeps often get ignored. We just zone out of them if we hear them every time, many times a day. And of course, buying the equipment is one part of making the operation work. And Brett's account today also offers a useful reminder about measurement. A reduction in flagged driving behaviors is a specific result, but it's also something that deserves attention without turning it into a claim about every incident or every road user. Simply understanding what a number represents can help us judge the technology more fairly. So big thank you to Brett from Republic Services for joining me today. You'll find the company website and and all the other links that we mentioned today in the show notes over at techtalksnetwork.com. But please share your thoughts. Where could better planning, clearer information, or practical coaching make the difference to the fleets that are serving our communities. And if you really enjoyed today's episode, I would encourage you to, run a quick search on the podcast player that you're listening to this and search for the episode entitled finding potholes before they form with AI and universes because there's an episode, I think it was with Jonathan Selby. He's the CEO of Stockholm based universes, and they were using computer vision and vehicle sensor to give road authorities a a much clearer picture of the infrastructure they manage. Ultimately, they were sticking sensors on the refuse trucks that were going down the streets every day. It's a great episode, that one. So I'll include a link on the show notes for that too. But anything else, please check out techtalksnetwork.com, and I will speak with you all again tomorrow morning. Bye for now.