How do you introduce electric vehicles and AI-assisted safety technology into a collection fleet that customers depend on every day?
On Tech Talks Daily, I'm joined by Brett Rogers, Vice President of Operations Technology at Republic Services, to discuss the engineering, infrastructure, and human decisions behind modern waste and recycling operations. Brett's background includes work at Toyota, General Motors, and Cruise. He describes arriving from the automotive sector and discovering how much complexity sits behind a service most people expect to happen without thinking about it.
We give particular attention to electric refuse trucks. Range is part of the calculation, but the vehicle also powers equipment that lifts containers and handles material. Brett explains how Republic Services models energy use across the chassis and collection body, taking account of terrain, climate, speed, and the work required on a route. The goal is to identify where an electric vehicle can replace a conventional truck while maintaining service.
Route selection can produce some surprising answers. A residential truck making frequent stops may benefit from regenerative braking, while a vehicle with fewer container lifts can spend much of its day covering distance. Brett describes why his team began with residential applications, then used operational data to inform expansion into other vehicle types. The number of lifts alone does not tell the whole story.
Charging has its own planning cycle. Brett says utility discussions, design, and construction can require decisions roughly two years before trucks are needed. We discuss why depot readiness has to lead vehicle delivery, alongside the arrangements that keep service running if power is interrupted. He describes spare vehicles and equipment that can accept emergency power, while on-site storage and renewable energy form part of the options being considered. These approaches have different levels of maturity, and the conversation keeps that distinction clear.
Technology-enabled safety is the other major focus. Brett describes adding a bird's-eye camera view to help drivers see around large vehicles, then working with vendors on systems that distinguish people from objects. Spoken alerts such as "pedestrian rear" are intended to tell a driver what is happening and where, without requiring them to keep checking another screen.
The discussion goes beyond installing cameras. Brett says in-cab alerts were associated with an initial reduction of around 20% to 30% in what Republic Services calls unfocused behaviors. He reports a reduction of 95% after coaching was added to the approach. These are company-reported behavioral measures, not a claim that collisions fell by 95%. No evaluation period or underlying methodology is provided in the interview. The useful operational lesson is the connection between technology, explanation, and the opportunity for drivers to correct a recurring behavior.
We also discuss employee adoption. Brett recalls drivers who were initially reluctant to move from diesel trucks and describes how time in the electric vehicles changed their view. He points to lower noise, vibration, and heat, alongside cab design. His account is a reminder that the experience of the person doing the job can determine whether a promising deployment becomes a useful everyday tool.
We finish with routing visibility for municipal customers and plans to use AI and other tools to improve operations. For fleet leaders, the conversation offers practical considerations around duty cycles, charging resilience, driver support, and measuring results. For everyone else, it reveals the work behind a truck arriving on the right street at the right time.
I'd welcome your thoughts. What would give you the most confidence in an electric fleet rollout, and how should organizations demonstrate that their safety technology is helping drivers and communities?
[00:00:04] What does it take to electrify a truck that stops a thousand times a day, lifts containers and still has to finish its route? Well, most of us put the trash outside and then just, let's be honest, we expect it to disappear. But behind that routine sits an engineering and logistics problem involving vehicles, charging, drivers and the people sharing their streets.
[00:00:29] Well, today on Tech Talks Daily, I'm delighted to be joined by Brett Rogers, Vice President of Operations Technology at Republic Services. And we're going to discuss why electric refuse trucks need energy calculations, calculations that include the equipment behind the cab, and also understand why chargers must be ready before the vehicles arrive and how route selection impacts deployment.
[00:00:56] And Brett will also explain how camera systems, spoken alerts and driver coaching can all use technology together to support safe operations. So if you're interested in technology that has to prove itself outside of a demo, hopefully this conversation will give you a look at the decisions behind a service that we only notice when it fails.
[00:01:19] So the next time you go out to take out the trash, I'm hoping you will remember this episode every single week. But seriously, let me introduce you to Brett now. So thank you for joining me on the show today. Can you tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do? Yep. So I'm Brett Rogers. I'm the Vice President of Operations Technology at Republic Services. And for a little background, Republic Services is one of the biggest environmental services companies in the United States.
[00:01:48] And so, and also we reach out into Canada. But for reference, we're about 42,000 employees spread across 1,000 locations across the country. And we operate a fleet of about 18,000 trucks. And that continues to grow every single year. So it's a pretty large fleet. And the way to look at it, we're touching about 5 million customers a day because our trucks are rolling through residential streets, commercialized sites, industrial sites. And so we have a large customer base and a lot of work to do as a result.
[00:02:17] My main responsibility is really looking at innovative technologies in order to better serve our customers, make our drivers' communities safer, as well as really help us achieve our sustainability goals. Wow. That's an incredible scale that we're talking about here. Yeah. And I was looking at your origin story or background, et cetera. And I'm curious, moving from automotive development into large waste and recycling fleet, a huge fleet there.
[00:02:43] What was it surprised you most about deploying this technology in an always or always on industrial operation? Oh, yeah. It's quite a bit different. And so, you know, my whole background's been in basically, so I'm a mechanical and energy systems engineer. And so I started out my career at Toyota working on the Prius program, then General Motors working on the Volt and Volt programs. Went over and worked at Cruise, which is fully autonomous vehicle operations before coming to Republic Services.
[00:03:13] And I kind of make this joke is that no one plans to work in this industry when you start out your career. Yeah. It's something that you don't think about. It's because when you think about, you know, refuse and trash, the biggest thing you want is to get rid of it. And so, you know, you roll it out to the side of the street and then you just expect it to be gone in the morning. And so then, you know, put a little thought into, hey, what all goes into, you know, getting this trash removed?
[00:03:41] And so when I joined Republic Services, especially coming from, you know, autonomous vehicle land, I'm like, nothing's more complicated than autonomous vehicles. If I can figure that out, you know, just picking up the trash and disposing of it, it's easy. I came over here, I was shocked. The complexity and the logistics that is required to actually pick up the trash, pick up the recycle and do something with it is extremely complex, which is also why it's really, really fun.
[00:04:09] But I say all that because when the industry is always on, you know, people notice. If you pull your trash out to the street and it doesn't get picked up, you're not happy. If you don't care how it disappears, you just want it to disappear. So coming over here, it's really important for, to focus on people, processes and technology, the whole gamut. And so when automotive development, we're really focused on building a really good product for customers. And so we're looking at technology that our customers want to buy and utilize.
[00:04:38] When coming over to Republic Services, it's a full operation. So now I'm not just focused on the vehicle. I'm not just focused on a particular set of technology. I'm looking at all these things combined in order to better serve our customers and make our drivers' lives easier. And so there's some similarities between the two as far as like, hey, advanced technology, safety technology, sustainability technology is transferable.
[00:05:02] But as far as actually operationalizing this and making sure it's the best thing we do for our customers and the best thing we do for our drivers, you know, that's a challenge. And that's been really fun to go and tackle. And before talking about the solution and everything, I'd love to make everybody listening aware of some of the challenges that you must be dealing with here, especially around EVs and tech-enabled safety, especially on a fleet of this size, 18,000. There's a huge health and safety remit, I would imagine there.
[00:05:31] So tell me a bit more about the challenges around EVs and tech-enabled safety. Yeah. Yeah. So on EVs, really as an industry, it's in its infancy. So when I first came over to Republic Services, there weren't many EV class A refuse trucks on the road. And so we really had to look from the ground up at what do we need? What do we need to be successful in order to go to zero tailpipe emissions in our trucks?
[00:06:00] Because for reference, the majority of our fleet are diesel trucks. We also have renewable gas trucks out there, about 20%, 25% of our fleet in order to reduce emissions. And EV is really that next step for emissions reduction. But it has to work because it's an always-on business. We have to go execute our jobs. We have to make sure our drivers have the right tools to do so. And so when we looked at the EVs, it was really about how do we make these trucks a one-for-one swap with our diesel trucks?
[00:06:25] And so that goes as far as, hey, making sure we have the right performance, making sure that the ergonomics and the functionality of the trucks are transformable. But the hottest topic, especially five years ago, was range. Are these trucks going to have enough range to actually service our customers? And so we spent a lot of time understanding power draw and so understanding, hey, how much energy is actually used to propel the vehicle at different speeds, different terrains, different climates.
[00:06:53] But then also, if you think about a refuse truck, and this is one of the more exciting things that I didn't think about until joining the industry, we basically have like a robot on the back of a chassis. You know, it's all those bodies, they have that arm that comes out and picks up the cans. And so you got to think about, hey, how much energy does that take? And then understand the body power draw, the chassis power draw, combine it all together, understanding the different climates, the terrains.
[00:07:18] And what we've been able to do on our side is actually create range estimators or power draw estimators for our company in particular. And then we can feed in different types of EVs into that model. And we know where these trucks work and how to do one-for-one truck swaps on the fly. And so when it came to EV, those were the big challenges on the truck. Then there's also challenges on the charger side. And so especially five years ago, now the scope has changed a little bit.
[00:07:48] There's a lot of data centers out there that we're competing with. But as far as getting power, what we have to do is make sure that we have chargers in the ground before the truck show up. And so it sounds like a simple concept, but you basically need to know where trucks work two years before you need the truck. So you can kick off the utility conversations, the design, the construction of the chargers to make sure that we're able to charge the trucks. And that's been a fun challenge as well.
[00:08:13] And so far we've had 100% success rate as far as having charges in the ground and operational before trucks show up. That's kind of the EV side of the fence. When it comes to safety, I originally came over to here to really focus on EV, but saw a bunch of opportunities on how to leverage technology as far as telematics and adding advanced safety features, especially from the autonomous vehicle industry. You know, they're using all different types of sensors. They have cameras, LiDAR, they have radar systems on their vehicles.
[00:08:43] And then even probably in your personal vehicle, you're used to like a bird's eye view around your vehicle. So you can see 360 degree around you. I hopped in some of our refuse trucks and all they had was a backup camera. And these trucks are huge. And so I'm getting in the truck and I'm on private property. I don't have a CDL, so I can't drive on public roads. But so I get in a truck and I'm like, it was hard to drive. It's hard to see around. And I'm thinking our drivers are amazing.
[00:09:09] Our drivers are very good, but wouldn't it be nice if they had the common tools that we have in, you know, a vehicle that can buy off the lot? And so we started looking at technology, which started out with just a 360 bird's eye view. So now our drivers can see 360 degrees around the vehicle while they're driving in neighborhoods. So these are the same trucks that are driving through our residential neighborhoods, our commercial neighborhoods.
[00:09:32] And if you think about it on the commercial side, those are our dumpsters that are outside of, you know, like your grocery stores or your fast food chain. And they're going in and out with a lot of people traffic around them. So we want to make sure our drivers can see around them really well. But we also want our drivers focused on driving. And so that was the other challenge when it comes to safety is how do we give them the visibility and tools required to do their job but not create a distraction?
[00:09:59] And so what we were able to do is team up with various vendors and actually come up with basically machine learning and AI that can tell the difference between a person and an object. And then we can give different audible cues to our drivers, such as they may react differently to an object behind them because they might want to back up close to that object in order to get out of a tight spot compared to a person. If they know a person's behind them, they're going to stop and assess the situation and be able to react properly.
[00:10:27] So what we've done is not only given visual cues to our drivers, but we also give audible cues. And so our drivers know when to actually react without taking their eyes off the road or taking their eyes off the job. And then when we talk about verbal cues, we're not talking about beeps because even in maybe your personal car, you start getting like tone deaf to those beeps.
[00:10:46] And so we have had a large focus on giving audible cues, such as pedestrian rear, pedestrian front to actually tell them what is happening around them and where that thing is happening at. So then they can react properly. And so what we really consider that is giving them the tools to prevent incidents from happening real time. And so when you hear the terminology ADAS, this is kind of like our ADAS, our advanced driver alert systems.
[00:11:11] But then we've also taken safety technology to the next layer on top of that is how can we use technology to help coach our drivers? And so what we have is actually camera systems in our vehicles that can see, hey, how close are you following the vehicle in front of you? And so if our drivers are following a vehicle too close, we can say increase following distance. We can tell them what they need to do in order to remedy the situation.
[00:11:37] Or for instance, you know, you really shouldn't be on your cell phone while driving a truck. And so we can sense if they're on their cell phone or if they're distracted from looking at the road. And then we actually tell them how to correct was like put the phone down or distracted driving. And so with that, what we've seen is just with those types of alerts in the cab, we monitor those behaviors and we saw about 20 to 30% reduction in what we call unfocused behaviors. And so that's making our drivers safer, which is making our community safer.
[00:12:08] But when it comes to technology deployment, which I hit on a little bit before the people processes technology, what we really needed is a bigger focus on our people and processes. And when it comes to that in particular piece of technology, because what we added in was a coaching program. So what we do is allow our drivers to self-correct and the self-correct. Great. But if we see like, hey, they're constantly having this following distance issue, maybe we should sit down and actually coach them.
[00:12:37] And say like, hey, this is why following distance is important. You know, we don't want to hit the person in front of us. We want to have enough time to react. And so we'll sit down with them and actually have a conversation with them and teach them, hey, what's the why behind this? And why are we asking you to increase the following distance? And then also saying, hey, this is how you follow correctly and giving them the proper coaching. And what we found is when we added in coaching to the technology, we went from a 20% decrease to a 95% decrease in unfocused behavior.
[00:13:07] So a huge step change and really the effectiveness of the technology by adding in really robust processes that are tailored towards our people. It's incredibly cool what you're doing here. And I must admit, I do get a big kick out of sharing stories on this podcast because I think very often when people take out their trash, they're not thinking about technology. That's the furthest thing from their mind.
[00:13:31] And I must admit, I get a kick out of sharing stories like this and really delivering that wow factor because I was chatting with someone in Sweden recently and they had attached cameras to all of their waste management trucks and they were scanning for potholes in the road, recording it and sending it to their authorities who would then go and fill those potholes before they got big. So technology is everywhere.
[00:13:56] So where else are you seeing AI improving both driver and community safety or just anything? And what evidence tells you it's working? Because it's not tech for tech's sake here. You're seeing real results, right? Yeah, so absolutely. So on the safety side, we're seeing a huge reduction in our incidents overall, which is driving our safety aspect of the fence. But we also have advancements in, and I really like your story about the 360 cameras.
[00:14:23] There's a bunch of different ways you can leverage that technology. We haven't dove so far into that, but we are looking at ways that we can better serve our customers as far as how can we give them visibility into their communities in order to really help them improve? And I think that pothole scenario is a really good example, but we're also using it with transparency in our routing. And so when you think about it, cities actually contract out their services. Some operate their own, some contract out.
[00:14:52] And if a customer calls them up about a particular question or a customer is asking like, hey, I didn't get my trash picked up. And the city's really left on their heels. How do I react to this? And they're trying to figure out what has already happened. And you don't know. So sometimes maybe they didn't get picked up because the truck hasn't driven by yet. Maybe they didn't get picked up because they set their can out too late. Or maybe it was a mess and it needs to get revenue and someone needs to come back. But the cities don't know.
[00:15:21] And so this technology is really giving us that transparency with the city to give them the tools to see what's happening real time. And so instead of them being reactive and trying to figure out in the past what's already been happening, they really can use these tools in order to see, hey, what's the status of this delivery? And they can talk to their customers like, hey, that truck hasn't driven by you. You can expect it at so-and-so time. And so now it eases the customer and makes our customers happier, makes our cities happier.
[00:15:49] And overall, just that increase in visibility and transparency, I think it's going to go a long ways. And we've started rolling out that technology as well. And of course, electric collection trucks operate under very different conditions from passenger vehicles. I'm curious, are there any engineering or even charging problems that become apparent at a fleet of the scale that we're talking about here? Yeah. So on the electrification side, we had a heavy focus on the major components.
[00:16:16] You have your high voltage batteries, you have your electric motors. And we are overly focused on those, and they have been performing extremely well. We are also extremely sensitive on range. And what we're finding out that the performance is actually better than expected on our EV trucks, they can basically work anywhere across the country. But obviously, we do a double check with our power draw analysis to make sure they can work well. And so when it comes to EVs, the interesting thing, it's not so much about do they work or not?
[00:16:46] It was about driver adoption. And so we have some drivers and EVs kind of have some preconceived notions correlated to them, whether that's fair or not. That's a different conversation. And so some of our drivers say, hey, I'm a diesel driver. I only want to drive diesel trucks. I don't really want to get into these EVs. And so they didn't want to drive them at first.
[00:17:07] And so that was an interesting hurdle that we didn't really plan on because these EV vehicles have 30% more interior volume because you're eliminating an engine. They have less vibration, less heat generation, less noise, all because the engine's removed and better ergonomic caps. And so we're like, hey, these trucks are just way better. Why would anyone not want to get in them? But then it turned out it was just those preconceived notions about EV in general. And once we got our drivers in there, then they loved them.
[00:17:35] It took them about one to two weeks of driving them and they never wanted to go back to their diesel trucks. But other issues that we've kind of seen is on the charging side. One of the questions we get is what happens if the power goes out? Because if the power goes out, you still want your trash picked up. And so we really have these grid resiliency plays in. And there's different stages of our grid resiliency. One is when we introduce EVs, it's not all at once to a location.
[00:18:02] We want to make sure that we have a spare ratio on site. So as we phase in these EVs and it's new technology and with new technology comes potential problems. We want to make sure there's a backup vehicle, whether it's a RNG or conventional vehicle on site. That is the most rudimentary way of resiliency. But we've also layered in another layer of resiliency is when we put in switch gears. And so for background, when you put in charging infrastructure, you put in a transformer. That's normally what the utility puts in.
[00:18:31] And then we put in a switch gear with the transformer plugs into. And that's kind of like a gigantic circuit breaker. That's what feeds all your chargers. Within our switch gear, we're actually able to add in components that allow us to backfeed it. Now you can backfeed it in multiple different ways. On the very crude way, you can backfeed it with a generator. And so, hey, in an emergency, if power goes out, you can pull a generator up, plug it into the switch gear, backfills all your chargers. And now you're able to charge your vehicles again.
[00:18:58] But, you know, the more clever ways to do it are on a microgrid system. And so we're looking at ways where we can use on-site energy storage, renewable energy in order to make sure our resiliency is there on site. So then we can backfeed our vehicles in case the power goes out and we can still service our customers. And so there's a bunch of different scenarios that we have to think about. It's not just plug and play at this type of technology. We have to make sure it's durable and that we're delivering that reliable service that our customers are seeking. Wow, I'm curious.
[00:19:27] How do you decide which of those routes, depots or vehicle types are ready for electrification and which are not? I suspect we'll have people listening from all across the U.S. and around the world. How do you make that decision like that? Yeah, the first thing we did when we decided, hey, what vehicles to go after first is vehicle types. 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.
[00:19:54] 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 or 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 100, 120 cans a day where our residential trucks are picking up more like 1,000 cans a day. And then our third type of vehicle are our roll-off trucks for our industrial large containers.
[00:20:23] And so these are like the really large containers you see at 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 1,000 lifts, 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.
[00:20:52] 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.
[00:21:13] 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 1,000 stops a day. The next one would be the front load, which is around 100, 120 stops a day.
[00:21:43] And the hardest applications for EVs, because it's mainly just deadhead miles, is the roll-off truck, which is only six lifts. 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 going to intentionally go out and pick the shorter routes, the one with lower lifts, in order to make sure that technology works.
[00:22:12] 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] I was going to say the pace of technological change is showing 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 is your big focus now?
[00:23:01] 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 our public services, what you're going to 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 going to be a big driver next year. And we'll see more and more coming out of there. Awesome. Well, I'll be watching you very closely.
[00:23:29] And that's great for anyone wanting to find out more about Republic Services, everything that you're doing, how they can get involved, where should they go? Yeah, the best place to go is republicservices.com. And also, if you want to get synced up with me, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn. 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] Yeah, thanks for bringing me on. Appreciate it. 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 the 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.
[00:24:28] 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 behaviours 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.
[00:24:52] Simply understanding what a number represents can help us judge the technology more fairly. So a big thank you to Brett from Republic Services for joining me today. You'll find the company website and all the other links that we mentioned today in the show notes over at techtalksnetwork.com. But please share your thoughts.
[00:25:15] 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.
[00:25:45] And they were using computer vision and vehicle sensor to give road authorities 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.