OTTAWA — From a control room in a low industrial building northwest of Toronto, technicians at Metro Compactor Service are monitoring trash machines across the continent.

The company, nearly 45 years old, is seeking to disrupt the waste-management industry with home-grown technology it calls iSmart, which uses Internet-of-Things sensors to report in on the state of the compactors and balers that Metro sells and services.

“We have customers call in who say, ‘I need a service technician to come to our site,’” Andrew Strudwicke, Metro’s president, told The Logic in an interview from the company’s headquarters in Brampton, Ont. “If they have iSmart technology installed, we can go into that system remotely and see all the diagnostics of that system to say, ‘Hey, it’s saying here that your emergency-stop button is pushed.’”

Strudwicke, an engineer originally from the U.K., joined Metro in a division that installs waste chutes and equipment in high-rises, a field whose technical challenges include averting clogs, containing odours and not spreading fires. A bad garbage chute is a big problem, but a good one is practically invisible while being essential to the people who use it.

The same goes for trash compactors, which typically sit on the ugly sides of malls and plazas, or in the bowels of high-rises, doing their dirty jobs until they don’t.

“When we’re looking at things like iSmart, it’s not just building steel containers or equipment for the waste system,” Strudwicke said. “It’s also this whole different technical innovation that just makes it extremely exciting.”

If an emergency-stop button is tripped (and there’s no real emergency), the customer on the phone might be told to do the garbage-compactor equivalent of turning the machine off and on. That saves a truck’s fuel and a technician’s time—all the more important in a 24/7 service operation that promises quick responses in emergencies.

Work-life balance is a major concern for Metro’s workforce, and just getting to a customer’s site can take hours if traffic is bad, Strudwicke said. The fewer of those trips, the better.

Metro Compactor Service’s customers include Walmart, Best Buy and Toronto Community Housing in Canada, and Target in the United States. Much of the service work on its gear is handled by subcontractors, though Metro has its own technicians in the Toronto area and in Vancouver, Strudwicke said.

Compactors and waste bins have had sensors available for a while that measure how full they are—sometimes with cameras or light detectors, sometimes with more advanced sonic devices that can monitor not only how high the garbage is piled but how evenly it’s distributed.

Now containers can send email or text alerts when they’re close to full. Those can be configured to go directly to haulage contractors, so the facility owner doesn’t even need to be involved. Either way, it cuts out trips for haulers who don’t wind up emptying bins when they’re only half full.

The newer generation of sensor takes this a step further, enabling technicians at Metro Compactor HQ in Brampton to monitor things like oil pressure in the heavy machinery and whether capacity sensors are blocked, Strudwicke said. That allows some incipient “faults” to be caught before they shut a machine down, by workers minding the panels from afar.

The iSmart sensors aren’t free. The cost depends on the machine, and retrofits are more expensive, but building them into a compactor costs less than $1,000, Strudwicke said.

“If you avoid two trips, with a minimum cost of $250 to $500, just to get to a customer to see that their emergency stop is pushed, you save that right off the bat,” he said.

A device fitted with sensors also means a new revenue stream for Metro Compactor, a monthly fee of $50 to $100 for monitoring.

In 2020, under Strudwicke’s predecessor, Metro Compactor even joined the Momentum program run by Ontario’s MaRS Discovery District. Momentum is aimed at helping companies scale up into powerhouses with $100 million in revenue.

As a company already in its 40s, well established in a grimy industry, Metro Compactor was something of an ugly duckling in the program’s flock of fledgeling cleantech, fintech, biotech and AI companies. It wasn’t totally out of place—other participants include StormFisher, which runs plants for extracting useful substances like biogas out of garbage, and Livestock Water Recycling, which makes systems for processing manure. But for Metro, Momentum didn’t work out.

“Some great intention was there, but it became clear the program was really better suited toward startups, whereas Metro Compactor Service is a deep-rooted and established (albeit technologically innovative) company, with a 40-year legacy and pedigree,” Strudwicke wrote in an email, answering a follow-up question.

(MaRS spokesperson Andrew Yates confirmed Metro had dropped out, but that’s all: “We don’t feel we are the right people to be discussing their business,” he told The Logic.)

Metro is, nevertheless, growing. In November, the company bought Compaction Plus, a smaller firm that sold and rented waste-handling equipment, intending to add iSmart sensor packages to Compaction Plus’s product line.

Strudwicke is convinced that businesses struggling with rising costs will want to shave expenses anywhere they can.

“There’s so much out there that we can do,” he said. “We can even send things like email alerts to customers, just to say, ‘Hey, you know, there’s something going on here.’ That’s never really been something that’s [done in a] traditional waste industry like ours. It’s always been, ‘We’ll just get to you as soon as possible.’”