City of Livermore & Livermore Sanitation

The City of Livermore has monitored residents’ participation in its recycling and composting programs since fall 2013. Even so, the City continued to see regular resident confusion about what belongs in each cart, while working toward its municipal goals and SB 1383 requirements. In 2024, Livermore Sanitation introduced the City to Prairie Robotics.

In partnership with the City of Livermore and Livermore Sanitation, Prairie Robotics installed AI technology on collection trucks to identify contamination in residents’ Green Organics Carts. When items that don’t belong are found, the household receives an “OOPS” postcard with a picture of their cart pointing out the items that don’t belong, the collection date, and a reminder of what goes in the Green Organics Cart. Every postcard is printed in both English and Spanish.

Livermore Sanitation installed Prairie Robotics equipment in Winter 2025, collected baseline data in Spring 2025, and launched its education campaign in Summer 2025. Since launch, 82% of households that received an OOPS postcard subsequently achieved clean collections after receiving two or fewer postcards, and 18% of all monitored households received 49% of all postcards. The data showed that a small share of households contributes an outsized portion of contamination.