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Trash is strewn next to Radio Beach in Oakland, Calif., on May 30, 2023. On Tuesday, city officials approved a pilot program that will allow drones to help identify hot spots for illegal dumping in Oakland.<\/p>\n
Douglas Zimmerman \/ SFGATE<\/p>\n
Oakland is turning to artificial intelligence to hunt down one of its most visible problems, sprawling piles of trash illegally dumped across the city.<\/p>\n
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On Tuesday, the Oakland City Council approved<\/a> a six-month pilot program that will allow AI-powered drones to sweep across the city and locate illegal dumping. District 1 councilmember Zac Unger,\u00a0who helped spearhead the initiative, told SFGATE that the council also approved increasing dumping fines. (Currently, fines reach up to $1,500<\/a> for three-time offenders.)<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n The $150,000 program will use drones from Aerbits,<\/a> a San Francisco AI startup, to fly over areas of the city at about 120 feet and locate piles of abandoned trash, according to city documents. The drones will cover 1,440 linear road miles during the pilot program throughout 72 scheduled flights, according to the City Council\u2019s presentation.\u00a0<\/p>\n The drones will not be used for enforcement purposes, but they will help identify the dumping hot spots in the city,\u00a0Unger said. Because the reporting surrounding the dumping is not always accurate, sometimes crews show up without the proper tools to clean up the trash. But the aerial cameras can help officials accurately map where the garbage is, determine what kind of waste it is and send the proper resources.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cA crew will go out with a truck that is equipped to pick up, let\u2019s say, tires, and they actually find out that it\u2019s a bunch of refrigerators that have been dumped there. And so then they\u2019ve wasted a trip because they brought the wrong equipment,\u201d Unger said. \u201cWe can send the right crew the first time, and that saves a lot of time and effort.\u201d<\/p>\n Fixed cameras will be placed at the dumping hot spots to issue fines using license plate numbers, similar to a parking ticket,\u00a0Unger said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n The drone images will \u201cexclude private property and personally identifying information,\u201d according to the city\u2019s report, and if any images capture a person\u2019s face, the image will be deleted and not retained, according to city documents. The drones also do not record video or audio or use license plate or facial recognition.\u00a0<\/p>\n Unger said one of the biggest challenges in cleaning up the city streets is that not all illegal dumping is reported equally. According to the city presentation, reports submitted through the OAK311 hotline<\/a> are more concentrated in wealthier neighborhoods, even though there is often less trash.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere are some folks in some neighborhoods who have the time and the computer literacy and the wherewithal to do a lot of reporting, but that doesn\u2019t necessarily correlate with where the majority of the dumping is,\u201d Unger said. \u201c\u2026 This will actually help us go after where the majority of the dumping is, not the majority of the reporting.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n