Bin Tagging in Cape Town

The City of Cape Town is electronically tagging all its wheelie bins in an effort to improve service delivery and limit theft.

The tags will allow the City to monitor each bin serviced and to identify bins that are lost, stolen, or illegally serviced without being City property.

I get that scanning a bin as it is “serviced” (i.e. emptied), is reasonable and could provide good data as to how effectively refuse collection teams are working. And of course, I understand that being able to scan a stolen bin could assist in reuniting it promptly with its rightful (and probably tearful) owner.
But I’m not sure about bins being “illegally serviced”. Who would do that? Why would anyone want to do that? Surely you’d need a big truck with which to block the traffic and one of those hydraulic lifty things on the back. I can’t see anyone doing that. Really, I can’t.

Anyway, the upshot of this is that every single one of the city’s 800,000 bins is going to be tagged by teams from RAMM Technologies. They’ll be coming round to your house (assuming you have a house, that house is in Cape Town and you have a bin) and electronically tagging it. You should expect their call over the next couple of months.

For the public to easily identify these crews, RAMM crew members will be required to carry an identification card containing the following information:

• City of Cape Town logo
• Photograph of the crew member’s face
• Member’s surname
• Member’s first name/s
• RAMM operations’ telephone number

This information not only means that you can easily identify RAMM crew members and also for any impostor to have all they need to craft a realistic-looking fake ID card. Happy days. If you’re worried that the people at your door aren’t from RAMM, you can call their depot on 086 111 7266 to check.