California Waste Solutions To Play Major Role With AI Optical Sorters In Helping Oakland Combat Illegal Dumping
California Waste Solutions Supports Oakland Illegal Dumping Cleanup
OAKLAND, Calif., Sept. 24, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- California Waste Solutions, Inc. is putting AI scanners and expanded optical sorting to work at its Bay Area plants as Oakland launches a new aerial AI program which will help the City of Oakland to detect illegal dumping before it sits on the street.
The city announced Aerbits on September 10 consisting of AI-assisted aerial imagery meant to spot abandoned trash instead of waiting on 311. Separately, California Waste Solutions, Oakland's longtime recycling contractor, is installing EverestLabs AI scanners at its 10th Street material recovery facility in Oakland and increasing Pellenc optical-sorting capacity at the Timothy MRF in San Jose.
California Waste Solutions announced this month that it is adding AI components to its optical sorters. The company's most recent investment in the AI optical sorters stand to support the city in its aim to crack down on the problem of illegal waste dumping.
"We are delighted to help the City of Oakland where we are from in fighting illegal waste dumping," said Michael Duong, President of California Waste Solutions. "Our family company grew up in Oakland and expanded to southern California and as far away as Vietnam, but everything we built has been based on my father and grandfather's early days picking up trash on the streets of Oakland. Illegal disposal of trash has always presented the city with a huge problem and we are supportive of the City's efforts to curb it."
Mayor Barbara Lee rolled out Aerbits with founder Brian Johnson last week. The flights sit inside a larger cleanup push with more cameras, higher fines and a $9.2 million Crankstart-backed investment announced in June. Illegal dumping is still one of the loudest quality-of-life complaints in the city.
California Waste Solutions collects Oakland's recyclables and runs them through the plant. The new Oakland scanners watch material entering the container line and report what is still headed for disposal. There they count items, record belt burden and show how much belt is left exposed, so operators can see when a line is running too deep or too uneven to recover what should have been pulled.
California Waste Solutions has used optical sorting in its U.S. plants since the mid-2000s. By investing in the AI sorting technology, California Waste Solutions is investing in both recovery of more items and purity of the recyclable material coming out of the convey belts.
"There is no question that the more you reduce illegal waste dumping, the more you see high-quality results come out of recycling facilities such as ours," said David Duong, Founder of California Waste Solutions. "We have seen this over the past four decades that we've been in the recycling business, from the ground up, picking trash off the street, to running sophisticated factories like we have today employing hundreds of skilled workers. The better organized and regulated the trash disposal process is, the better the result for customers – which at the end of the day, really means the city's residents."
The new AI scanners at California Waste Solutions give crews a running record instead of a walk-through once a shift. If the same recyclable keeps showing up at the end of the line, supervisors can look upstream to settings, loading, and contamination and change the operation. That data is also helps determines what comes next. Robotics, more optical sorting, or both are under consideration; the company only adds machines when it knows what is actually being missed.
Loads still change by the truck as packaging formats shift, too. Contamination changes how material rides the belt while batteries, plastic bags, food waste and trash still belong nowhere near a recycling cart. For these, more specialist recycling facilities are required. California Waste Solutions has collected household batteries at the curb in Oakland since 2015 and plans curbside battery collection for single-family homes in San Jose in early 2027.
"When people think of recycling materials, they often just think of junk lumped together as one collective mass. That's not how it works at all, however. Recycling requires an extremely careful process of first identifying what you're recycling and then going in to determine how you are going to recycle, if you can recycle it at all. This is why the City is absolutely right to crack down on illegal, dumping, since that process bypasses all these necessary steps and corrupts the end result. We are thrilled that our new AI optical sorters will play a more defined role in helping the city to achieve these aims," said Michael Duong.
The company is offering plant access at 10th Street: a representative load, the EverestLabs scanners in operation, Pellenc optical sorting in San Jose, and the items crews pull in a typical week. Labels that say recyclable are not always recoverable once they reach that belt which is a distinction that matters more as SB 54 moves into implementation and California's expanded CRV rules take hold.
California Waste Solutions, founded in Oakland in 1992, serves more than 343,000 customers in Oakland and San José and operates six Bay Area facilities.
About California Waste Solutions
Founded in 1992 by David Duong, California Waste Solutions provides recycling collection, processing, customer service, and material recovery for residential, commercial, and municipal customers in Northern California, including Oakland and San José. Through its subsidiary Vietnam Waste Solutions, the company also operates large-scale environmental infrastructure in Ho Chi Minh City. Headquarters: 1211 Embarcadero, Suite 300, Oakland, CA 94606. www.calwaste.com.
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Wendy Nguyen
PR & Marketing Manager
California Waste Solutions
SOURCE California Waste Solutions
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