New York Times: “Rubicon, based in Atlanta, isn’t in the business of hauling waste. It doesn’t own a single truck or landfill. Rather, companies hire it as a kind of waste consultant. It begins by holding an online bidding process for its clients’ waste contracts, fostering competition among waste management businesses and bringing down their prices….Though unscientific, Dumpster-diving remains the primary way that those in waste management analyze their customers’ trash. “It’s literally: Here’s paper, here’s a cup, here’s books, here’s e-waste,” explained Ms. Beason, who has spent 25 years rummaging around Dumpsters in various waste management jobs…Mr. Morris says he believes that the future of the trash business lies in data. And Rubicon collects all sorts of it: the value per ton and per cubic yard of various materials, in various regions; the volume of clients’ waste; how often that waste is removed; which haulers are servicing which locations for which clients, and so on. The data lives in Rubicon’s proprietary software platform, called Caesar. (Mr. Morris, a fan of the classics, sees in Julius Caesar’s irrevocable river crossing “a fantastic story of disruption.”) One of Rubicon’s most basic data applications is simply to determine whether a client can have its garbage picked up less often. Because haulers traditionally charge per visit, they have an incentive to empty Dumpsters even when they’re only half full. Rubicon sees emerging technologies as creating opportunities to reduce such inefficiencies. It is experimenting, for instance, with a sonar-equipped device that measures whether a Dumpster is full….Even more grandly, Mr. Morris has said he would like all of his clients to divert 100 percent of their waste from landfills by 2022. Reaching such a goal would seem a threat to companies like Waste Management that are heavily invested in landfills. Yet Waste Management doesn’t appear to be worried about Rubicon, or to think a future without landfills is near.”