Waste Connections of Canada improves safety and accountability across 18,000 vehicles with Geotab

George South has seen what happens when safety breaks down in a waste management fleet. As District Manager for Waste Connections of Canada in the Greater Toronto area — overseeing a daily fleet of 105 trucks across rear load and specialty recycling services — South knows that a single incident can cost a driver their career, a company its self-insurance reserves, and a fleet its operational credibility. 

Waste Connections of Canada, North America’s third-largest waste hauler with 18,000+ vehicles across 300+ locations, uses Geotab as the foundation of its fleet safety and performance strategy. What that platform delivered was something no one anticipated: objective proof that a driver was innocent.

The challenge: managing safety, compliance, and risk at acquisition-scale

Waste Connections of Canada is built on acquisitions. Every time the company buys an operator, those vehicles join the Geotab platform. Managing safety, compliance, maintenance, and accountability across 18,000+ vehicles in 300+ locations is not just a technology problem — it is a culture problem. 

Three challenges defined the stakes:

• Scaling safety across a growing, acquired fleet: With 20,000 people and a company slogan of “Safety starts with one,” maintaining consistent driver behavior and incident accountability across a constantly expanding fleet required more than policy. It required real-time data.
• Managing risk on a self-insured model: Waste Connections self-insures. A single serious collision costs $500,000. Major incidents reach millions. Every preventable collision is a direct line to the bottom line.
• Proving service and compliance in the field: In waste management, being on-site is not enough. Proving that service was performed at the right time, at the right location, in the right way requires verifiable records that manual logs cannot provide.

The solution: Geotab as the core platform with layered integrations

DriveCAM integration for driver coaching

Geotab integrates with Waste Connections’ DriveCAM camera system to monitor aggressive driving, speeding, sharp lane changes, and unnecessary reversing. George South’s team runs daily violation reports and uses the combined data as the foundation of driver training programs. The goal is not discipline — it is risk reduction through coaching.

Predictive analytics and engine diagnostics

Working with their Geotab implementation partner ATI, Waste Connections built predictive engine failure monitoring directly on the Geotab platform. Engine code monitoring catches developing failures before they become breakdowns — preventing engine rebuilds, blown engines on route, and costly tow calls by enabling dispatch to radio drivers and shut vehicles down before damage escalates.

Electronic DVIRs and right-hand turn routing

Electronic Driver Vehicle Inspection Reports, integrated into the maintenance system, replaced paper pre-trip processes. The platform also enforces a right-hand turn bias in routing — reducing exposure at intersections and providing a timestamped, verifiable record that service was completed at each customer location.

HOS compliance and idle monitoring

Daily Hours of Service reports and fleet-wide idle monitoring give Waste Connections the compliance visibility to respond to any question about driver hours or vehicle location with objective, timestamped data — not recollection.

The results: a driver vindicated, an engine recall triggered, and risk managed 

Collision reconstruction that cleared a driver

The most consequential outcome of Waste Connections’ Geotab deployment was not a dashboard metric. It was an incident at a seniors’ home in the Greater Toronto area.

A driver was servicing waste containers located underneath a residential building on an inclined driveway. Protocol required leaving the truck at the top of the hill, walking down to retrieve the containers, and then returning the vehicle to complete the service. When the truck rolled down the hill and caused an incident, a supervisor arrived to find the parking brake disengaged. The immediate assumption: the driver — a seasoned veteran — had failed to engage it. Under Waste Connections safety protocols, that failure results in automatic dismissal.

George South’s team ran the Geotab collision reconstruction utility. Second by second, the data showed the driver had engaged the parking brake. The brake then began disengaging on its own. The truck rolled not because of driver error — but because of a parts failure in the braking system.

The driver was vindicated. The dismissal was reversed. And the data didn’t stop there: further investigation revealed that the same parts defect affected an entire production year of that truck model. The regional maintenance manager coordinated a full recall and retrofit across every affected vehicle.

“Geotab can show us, along with our DriveCAM system, when we’re driving aggressively, when we’re speeding, or when we’re taking lanes too sharply... we can use that all as part of our training programs to help reduce risk.”

— George South, District Manager in Greater Toronto, Waste Connections of Canada

Self-insured Risk Management at 18,000-Vehicle Scale

Being self-insured at this scale means every collision that does not happen is a direct dollar figure preserved. Waste Connections invests heavily in driver professionalism — Geotab is the accountability layer that validates that investment and surfaces the incidents where coaching, reconstruction, or preventive intervention can stop the next one.

“We contribute a tremendous amount of resources to the professionalism of our folks to set them up for success. Geotab is really the other side of that coin when it comes to accountability.” — George South, District Manager in Greater Toronto, Waste Connections of Canada

Results at a glance

Geotab as a leading fleet safety telematics solution

Waste Connections of Canada built its safety program around Geotab’s open and easy-to-use platform — but the tools available go further than collision reconstruction and third-party camera integration. For fleets evaluating the best telematics safety solutions, Geotab’s ecosystem includes GO FOCUS PLUS, a native AI-powered dashcam that delivers in-cab driver behavior alerts, collision detection, and video evidence without a separate vendor or integration layer. 

For fleets that want vehicle tracking, compliance monitoring, and dashcam-based safety managed inside one platform, it is already built in. Explore Geotab’s fleet safety telematics solutions and see how Go Focus Plus delivers native dashcam safety in one integrated platform