Comlurb, Rio's municipal cleaning company, watches its whole collection fleet by GPS from a control room in Tijuca — around 200 compactor trucks on some 800 routes, 24 hours a day Monday to Saturday, plus 650 other vehicles that raise real-time alerts when one leaves the city limits, stops too long, or tips at an unscheduled transfer station. Tracking is a licensing condition, not an option: since 2019 an accredited private hauler whose vehicle turns up for inspection without a tracker is failed outright, and rules re-issued in February 2026 require Comlurb to be able to watch those fleets live and to receive monthly reports of what they tipped where. A separate ordinance of November 2025 extended the same logic to large waste generators, who must now declare volumes and disposal sites or face fines. What the data layer has not fixed is recycling: Comlurb reports selective collection recovering about 5,700 tonnes a month, roughly 11% of the recyclable material it estimates the city throws away.
GPS arrived in Rio's waste system as a licensing condition before it became an efficiency tool. Comlurb can prove where a lorry went and stop a hauler that hides it — but has published no measured gain in collection cost, coverage or recycling.
Evidence• No measured figure
Scale🏙️ City-wide
Sources
↗ Prefeitura do Rio / Comlurb — Central de monitoramento da frota de coleta domiciliarCarries every operational figure in the snippet: 'Toda a frota da Comlurb é monitorada por GPS para garantir que os veículos não saiam do roteiro programado'; ~200 compactor trucks, ~800 routes, 24h Mon-Sat from the Tijuca operations centre; 650 further vehicles alerting on 'veículos que saíram dos limites do município do Rio de Janeiro; atrasos nas apresentações; longas paradas; veículos vazando os resíduos em Estações de Transferência de Resíduos (ETR) diferentes das programadas'; Power BI fleet dashboards. FETCH FAILURE: direct WebFetch fails with a redirect loop (10+ hops) on both the slashed and unslashed URL, and web.archive.org is unreachable from this environment; the Portuguese wording above was returned identically by three separate search passes. The page shows no publication date, so it does not date the control centre.
↗ Portaria COMLURB nº 2-N de 29/01/2019 (LegisWeb)Dates the tracking mandate. Art. 5.08: 'A não apresentação de rastreadores em cada um dos veículos a serem vistoriados será motivo para a sumária reprovação do veículo', and trackers must be compatible with Comlurb's own control and monitoring infrastructure; art. 5.09 obliges accredited firms to give Comlurb login credentials for route and discharge reports, with two named Comlurb staff under confidentiality agreements. This is the earliest firmly dated element of the data layer and the basis for yearStart 2019.
↗ Portaria COMLURB nº 2-N de 19/02/2026 (LegisWeb)Current accreditation rules for private collectors of special, healthcare and recyclable waste. Art. 9 §8: 'Todos os veículos pertencente à frota deverão estar equipados com rastreadores em conformidade com a Lei Estadual n° 6.862, de 15 de julho de 2014'; art. 9 §9 and art. 26 require real-time Comlurb monitoring plus reports of routes and deviations outside the municipality; art. 16 routes manifests through INEA's electronic MTR system; art. 18 §6 requires monthly reporting of recyclable tonnage and discharge points. Confirms the system is live in 2026.
↗ Comlurb — Banco de dados de geradores de lixo extraordinário (11 Nov 2025)Portaria nº 009 of 7 Nov 2025: large generators (over 120 litres or 60 kg/day under Lei 3.273/2001) must declare volumes, waste nature, contracted hauler and final destination; 90-day transition; 'O descumprimento das obrigações, incluindo o não envio ou o fornecimento de informações falsas ou incompletas, poderá resultar em advertências, multas e outras sanções legais.' Comlurb president named as Jorge Arraes.
↗ Comlurb — Coleta Seletiva: históricoThe recycling counterweight, in Comlurb's own words: 'cerca de 5.700 toneladas de materiais recicláveis por mês', 'cerca de 11% dos materiais potencialmente recicláveis', 'estimados em 40%'; 117 neighbourhoods served; ~450 families across 29 waste-picker cooperatives. Operator page with no visible date — read 26 July 2026.
↗ ((o))eco — Baía de Guanabara: passivo ambiental de Gramacho acirra conflitos com pescadores (4 June 2019)Supports every Gramacho claim in the notes: the Petrobras biogas supply contract was terminated in March 2018 after interruptions exceeding 180 days, with output below projection; INEA suspended Gás Verde's environmental licence over an unmet 2017 TAC worth R$9M; a 2018 court decision expanded leachate monitoring points after samples were found to have been collected at high tide; artisanal fishermen in Duque de Caxias attribute lost fish and crab stocks to leachate reaching the mangroves. Note the site is in Duque de Caxias, not the city of Rio.
↗ ResiduaLab (UERJ) — Organização dos catadores de Jardim GramachoClosure on 3 June 2012 after 34 years of operation; catadores organised through ACAMJG negotiated an indemnity of R$14,000 each, paid as a lump sum instead of over 14 years; ex-catadores lacking documents were blocked from claiming; the Polo de Reciclagem de Gramacho promised in August 2012 had, years later, not materialised. Verified through search extracts; the Fiocruz Mapa de Conflitos entry corroborates independently.
↗ ABEGÁS — Gás Verde inaugura unidades de biogás no RioTrade-press record that Gás Verde moved its biogas treatment unit off Gramacho because output from the landfill, shut to new waste in 2012, 'deixou de apresentar o volume necessário', and rebuilt at the Ciclus CTR Rio site in Seropédica (~10,000 t/day of Rio's waste). Not fetched directly — content taken from search extracts; the Seropédica plant is a private operation in another municipality and is referenced here only as the fate of the Gramacho project.
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Comlurb's GPS-Tracked Waste Collection Fleet” — Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/rio-comlurb-fleet-tracking/ (last verified 2026-07-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.
