Partners for Change

One of the things the team at Charopy is excited about in 2022 (and there are many many things to choose from) is the Partners for Change program run by Containers for Change in Queensland. The first of a number of sites going live with our smart bin technology under this program was AMP Capital's Indooroopilly Shopping Centre and looking at the photo below you can see what a great job they have done with the implementation.

A standard panel from Charopy has been retrofitted to an existing shopping centre bin surround and teamed with one of our digital screens to make the entire setup significantly more engaging for consumers using the bin. Actually the digital screen is simply a relatively low cost wifi enabled TV. Charopy deliver the content to that screen so that when the person uses the bin they can see in real time how their correct recycling behaviour is also supporting a local charity, funded by Queensland's container refund scheme. In addition, the screen shows the material type of the container being deposited and the breakdown of material types within the bin - partly to show consumers that this really is a smart bin that knows exactly what is going in.

If you are in Queenland and wanting to know more about how your organisation can benefit from the Partners for Change program the details on how to contact them can be found by clicking this link.

Digital screen integration

This recent installation of Charopy technology by Brookfield Place in Perth may be the most impressive client implementation to date. They have taken a redundant ATM location and turned it into an amazing CDS recycling bin that raises money for charity. This implementation has used our standard panel to ensure non contamination in collection, but what is most impressive is the digital screen that Brookfield Properties commissioned Charopy to design.

With a background of working in technology innovation I love it when a client asks for something we've never seen before. Whilst we have integrated a digital screen to live data from bin transactions previously, this was the first time we used a basic animation linking the behaviour of the current person standing in front of the bin to the behaviour of past users by showing the material breakdown of what is actually in the bin. This goes part of the way towards our dream of restoring public faith in recycling, as hopefully it will educate people more about the importance of a clean stream of recycling matter at the initial point of collection.

The screen also uses real time updates to show how the correct recycling actions of all customers are directly helping the charity partner of Brookfield; initially Plastic Free July. The screen has been designed in a way that the client can easily change the listed charity partner from time to time.

There is much more we could be doing with digital screens (including much bigger screens) dynamically linked to real time data on every bin transaction, and with the range of innovative clients that we are working with today, I am sure you are going to see a lot more activity in this space in the not too distant future.

If you want to see the on screen experience (and you can't get to the Perth CBD), please click here.

November Update: We've made this product even better now with a much faster updating of the screen when the bin is used. You can see the old versus the new by clicking here.

One other thing we have seen since launching is that the ground level digital screen has significantly raised the awareness of recycling with commercial office tenants in the building. This has caused a number of tenants to ask building management if they can also collect containers for recycling on their floors to raise money for the same nominated charity. To ensure their collections are recognised, building management can now manually edit the amount shown as raised for charity based upon collections from tenants, without having to put every can and bottle one by one through the Charopy bin.

It is always nice when you design a technology for one purpose and then it ends up having an even greater impact than first imagined.

Website refresh

In my last blog post I made reference to the Charopy website reflecting what the business looked like pre-Covid, but that this was not a fair representation of the business and product range today. Well the new and updated homepage just went live yesterday, and the rest of the site will be progressively updated to the new look and feel with some additional content added over the coming weeks / months. We are trying to go for a more industrial business to business look given the vast bulk of our clients are large businesses. And we have really tried to emphasise our expertise and credentials in the IoT smart bin space, as this is where we have spent the last two years building up a leading position within our specific market segment.

We also added this diagram to the homepage. In the past we have emailed this to clients and prospects, but I am keen to get more of this type of technical information into the hands of interested parties much sooner. Especially as there are now interior designers and others involved in the early stages of specifying products for commercial and retail fit-outs who need this type of information at their fingertips.

I will probably do a future post on this standard bin panel, including instructions on how to easily retrofit it into an existing bin housing, but for now it is just nice to see the homepage of this site better reflecting what we actually do on a daily basis, and not being all about products we used to sell or industry sectors that we used to service.