91TV

The impact of what happens in the cab today shows up on the balance sheet down the line. The technology to address the financial case this creates already exists and is broadly available, so the question is whether operators are looking at behavior as a safety metric or as a cost driver.
By Matt Klingbeil

While the safety conversation in waste and recycling usually lives with safety directors and operations managers, the strongest case for investing in driver-behavior technology is increasingly a financial one.

Four line items on a waste and recycling profit and loss (P&L) are affected when driver behavior changes: insurance premiums, litigation and claims exposure, driver turnover, and maintenance and total cost of ownership. Each of those four is a lagging indicator, with driver behavior being the leading indicator that impacts all of them.

The impact of what happens in the cab today shows up on the balance sheet six months, 12 months, or three years from now. The technology to address the financial case this creates already exists and is broadly available, so the question is whether operators are looking at behavior as a safety metric or as a cost driver. In waste and recycling, the shortest path to a better P&L runs through the cab.

Insurance Premiums: The Underwriter Wants to See the Video
Commercial insurance for waste and recycling fleets has climbed steadily over the past decade, with rate increases between 10 percent and 30 percent for auto liability and physical damage lines. Insurance carriers and brokers now expect video-telematics data as part of underwriting, mid-term reviews, and renewal negotiations.

What underwriters value today is not just the presence of cameras, but the presence of a scored, trending, real-time behavior signal. A daily behavior score that reflects harsh acceleration, harsh braking, careful backing, and distracted-driving trends is the kind of leading indicator carriers can actually price against and brokers can put in front of an underwriter to argue for a rate.

The trend is well-documented. ATRI’s annual Operational Costs of Trucking report has consistently identified insurance premiums among the fastest-growing cost lines for commercial fleets over the past decade. Vocational and refuse fleets typically sit at the higher end of that curve, which is where the leverage on any premium reduction is largest.

For a CFO, the connection is straightforward: sustained reductions in daily event rates translate into lower claims-frequency loss ratios, and loss ratios are one of the primary inputs into next year’s premium. Fleets that treat their behavior score as a rolling underwriting document and not a static safety report are the ones positioned to argue for lower rates at renewal rather than absorb default market increases..

Litigation and Claims Exposure: The Nuclear-Verdict Era
The last decade has produced a well-documented rise in nuclear verdicts—jury awards exceeding $10 million—against commercial fleets. Research from ATRI has tracked substantial growth in both the frequency and the average size of these awards over that period. 91TV and recycling operators are particularly exposed, because their vehicles operate in the same residential and mixed-use environments as pedestrians and passenger vehicles every day.

The single most effective defense in a serious claim is a clean, timestamped video with AI-generated context—the context matters as much as the footage. A harsh-braking event that looks reckless in isolation reads very differently when the video system attaches the pedestrian, vehicle, or road condition that actually triggered it.

That distinction is where fleets are seeing real dollars come back. Rumpke 91TV & Recycling, a family-owned operator with more than 2,700 vehicles across the Midwest, offers a documented example. In one case, a lawsuit against the company was dropped outright after in-cab video showed the opposing driver texting while running a stop sign. In another, a hit-and-run at a Rumpke site was captured cleanly enough to identify the responsible vehicle and clear the Rumpke driver. Both were direct dollars that never had to hit the P&L.

Even in claims that never escalate to a verdict, faster video access and richer context reduce defense costs, shorten settlement timelines, and change the negotiating posture with opposing counsel. That value accrues on every claim, not only the catastrophic ones.

Timothy Bath, Rumpke’s Senior Vice President of hauling, has described the effect in more personal terms: “One driver who hated the cameras at first thanked us the day after a hit-and-run. He realized we weren’t trying to punish him—we were trying to protect him.”

Driver Turnover: Where Culture Becomes a Line Item
Commercial driver turnover carries a real dollar cost per driver—recruiting, training, and the productivity ramp of a new hire—and while driver shortages have eased from a pandemic high, salaries are still being pushed higher year over year (as steep as 30 percent for some specialties), making every retained driver worth more this year than last. Punitive camera programs correlate with faster driver exit, while recognition-based programs correlate with retention. Both effects show up on the P&L within a year.

A pattern is playing out across waste and recycling that operators watching the labor line should pay attention to. A growing number of fleets are tying safety-bonus programs directly to real-time driver scores. Weekly, monthly, and quarterly incentives are paid out on the score—cash bonuses for top performers, gift-card competitions across teams, and depot-versus-depot leaderboards that turn safe driving into a visible, rewarded activity. Drivers who initially received the technology skeptically become active participants once the scoring feels fair and the recognition is real. The financial calculation is straightforward. A modest weekly bonus pool costs far less than the turnover and recruiting expense it helps avoid and it changes how drivers experience the cab.

The cultural framing that comes with the recognition model matters as much as the incentive structure. As Bath put it: “We’re not about catching people doing something wrong. We’re about helping them get better every day.”

Maintenance and Total Cost of Ownership
Every harsh brake event costs brake life, every hard launch costs drivetrain stress and fuel burn, and every idle event costs fuel and engine hours. Multiplied across the 600 to 1,000 stops a residential route can involve—per truck, per day—the compounding is significant.

Reducing the frequency of those events is one of the most direct ways to reduce fleet operations expenses: every avoided harsh stop is brake life preserved and every avoided hard launch is drivetrain stress avoided. And in an operating environment averaging 2.5 MPG, small per-stop improvements from smoother acceleration and earlier deceleration add up quickly into meaningful annual fuel savings.

ATRI’s Operational Costs of Trucking tracks repair-and-maintenance costs as a persistent double-digit share of total operating cost per mile. In a segment as maintenance-heavy as refuse hauling, marginal reductions in harsh-event frequency translate into real annual dollars, most of which are recovered from expense lines the fleet was previously paying without noticing.

The Leading Indicator
Insurance premiums are set at renewal, claims settle over years, driver turnover reveals itself over quarters, and maintenance costs accumulate steadily. All four are lagging indicators. A fleet leader looking at those numbers is looking at behavior that already happened.

The leading indicator is different. It is the daily behavior score, the harsh-braking event rate this week compared to last, and the trend line on distracted-driving alerts across a shift, a route, or a depot. Each of those is measurable in real time, addressable within weeks, and predictive of every downstream financial impact.

Fleets that act on the leading indicator can respond before the lagging indicator shows up on the P&L. Fleets that do not are just managing the outcome.

The Bottom Line
The fleets that treat driver behavior as a safety KPI will get better safety numbers. The fleets that also treat it as a financial KPI will still get better safety numbers—and lower insurance premiums, lower turnover, faster claims resolution, and cheaper maintenance. All of it traces back to the same upstream decision.

In waste and recycling, that is the operating reality. The physical work is done in the cab, while the financial consequences are settled in the office weeks, months, or years later. The gap between the two is where the industry has, for a long time, been paying the difference.
Closing it is no longer a technology decision. It is a management one. The shortest path to a better P&L, in this industry, runs through the cab. | WA

Matt Klingbeil is Head of Growth and Vertical Marketing for Netradyne, where he partners with fleets and industry leaders to help them improve driver safety. He has spent nearly a decade in growth and marketing roles in the technology industry, with prior roles at leading physical security companies and in education technology, building go-to-market strategies for commercial and public sector customers. He can be reached at [email protected].