Oakland adds drones to fight against illegal dumping

Ali Adams dedicates much of her free time to cleaning up trash along Courtland Avenue and Redding Street in Oakland’s Maxwell Park neighborhood. She says the illegal dumping in her neighborhood reminds her of Detroit, where she grew up. 

“It seems that as time goes on, we’re supposed to be getting better with these things but at a certain point, it’ll tip if people just continually dump,” Adams said. “That’s kind of what I was starting to see here.”

Adams is among the many Oaklanders who are fed up with the debris, which the city has struggled for years to keep in check. Six months after adding weekend hours to the city’s clean-up efforts, Oakland is looking to drones to address the crisis. In April, Oakland City Council approved a six-month, $150,000, pilot program with Aerbit that will use drones to find trash dumping locations. 

The city has not said when it will launch. 

Using artificial intelligence, the Aerbit drone is programmed to find trash hidden behind vehicles and in remote locations. Operating under a pre-programmed flight path, a drone can cover one square mile in 30 minutes, monitoring dumping sites through 72 scheduled flight paths. This should enable Oakland Public Works to get ahead of resident reporting. 

The drones will not be used for enforcement. According to Aerbits founder Brian Johnson, images are processed with no facial recognition or license-plate reading. The only information documented is about waste. 

Since the pandemic, deserted trash in Oakland has been an ongoing problem. In 2025, the city received over 25,000 reports of illegal dumping through the OAK311 app — about 70 per day.

“I don’t even think we’re at the point where we’re measuring success,” said Councilmember Zac Unger. “Success wouldn’t be how much trash we collect. Success would be how much trash we don’t see.”

The notion of using drones to identify dump sites came to Johnson in 2021, after he left a job and began to explore his San Francisco neighborhood more with his children. During those outings, he noticed trash preventing his children from freely riding their scooters. 

“I thought to myself, I’m an engineer, how can I systemize this,” Johnson says on the Aerbits website. “I went up with the drone, and within two weeks, I had trained a little model with about 30 data points that kind of worked. I’ve spent the last two years working on this.”

This first case study was run by a single pilot and covered the Mission, Dogpatch, Excelsior, Portola, Bernal Heights, Bayview and Hunters Point. 

In three months, Johnson’s system had filed 1,500 reports to San Francisco’s 311. This included 525 large piles of loose garbage, 264 piles of bagged garbage, 98 furniture piles, 26 mattresses, 21 toxic liquid spills, 16 appliances and six overflowing trash cans. 

Every report filed was tracked until cleanup was confirmed, a system that city leaders hope to bring to Oakland. 

San Francisco did not continue with the program after the pilot. Rachel Gordon, director of policy and communications for San Francisco Public Works, said the city would have to seek competitive bids if it decides to contract for the service. 

More equitable than 311

Currently, Oakland relies on the 311 reporting system, which isn’t always efficient. For example, if information is vague and crews arrive with a truck equipped to collect furniture but find mattresses instead, they must return for a different truck, since mattresses require recycling. Drone technology is expected to eliminate miscommunication, mismatched equipment, improper crew sizing and misaligned location priorities. 

“The aerial imagery would identify the pile, and it would actually turn into a work order so that our forces could proactively abate it,” said Liam Garland, Public Works director, during the April 14 City Council meeting. “We wouldn’t have to wait for a 311 call. It would all be happening seamlessly.” 

At the City Council meeting, there were numerous questions, including where revenues from more citations and penalties would go and if the aerial technology is connected to Flock cameras. According to Garland, collections generate little revenue, creating limited incentive for enforcement. He also said the 36 cameras currently monitoring illegal dumping hotspots are not connected to Flock license-plate-reading technology and neither is the Aerbit drone. 

In addition to efficiency, the drones are expected to pinpoint dump sites more equitably. With the 311 system, more calls come from affluent communities, said Kristin Hathaway, assistant director of Public Works. But dump sites disproportionately spoil low-income and communities of color, eroding the quality of life.

“We want to do this with an equitable lens,” Hathaway said. 

According to the city’s 2026 Performance Audit of Illegal Dumping, the 311 phone line is available in multiple languages but the 311 app is strictly in English, limiting access, despite requirements under the city’s Equal Access Ordinance. 

For many residents, illegal dumping has become a daily reality outside their homes and in their neighborhoods. 

Adams is part of a group of Oakland residents and volunteers working to identify dumping patterns in the Maxwell Park neighborhood. In October, the group launched a fundraiser that raised $3,225 to install solar-powered cameras, large signs on Courtland Avenue and lights to deter dumpers.

“When it comes to the industrial dumping areas, that should be our main focus because a lot of that is industrial waste. They need to monitor who’s doing it,” Adams said. “For residential garbage, it’s a bit tougher because we don’t see it.”

Grant Chen, who lives in West Oakland near Interstate 980, has seen people dump mail, chairs, shoes, clothing and other things along the curbside. He suggests that the city make it easier for people to dump responsibly. “One idea I’ve had,” Chen said, “is to have Waste Management be responsible for meeting a certain number of bulky waste pickups or dropoffs. If they don’t meet that quota, they refund their savings to the city.” 

Oakland residents are entitled to a no-cost bulky pickup at their homes for mattresses, couches, garbage and other large debris. But, according to the city’s audit report, this service is underused by apartment buildings. Between 71 and 87 dumpsters allocated to multi-family dwellings went unused each year from 2023 to 2025. 

Some residents are also unable to tap into the bulk service because they aren’t signed up for basic trash collection. For many, cost is a barrier. The report says those gaps contribute to the volume of illegally dumped residential waste on Oakland streets and sidewalks. 

Waste Management reported collecting nearly 500 million pounds of legally disposed garbage in Oakland last year. And in October, Mayor Barbara Lee announced that city crews would be deployed on weekends to clear dump sites.

In many neighborhoods, volunteers have stepped up to meet the challenge. High Street Coalition, for example, coordinates bi-monthly trash pickups along High Street in East Oakland. Shoshanna Tenn, one of the group’s founders, says the city could help by offering more support to the volunteer groups. 

The coalition picks up about 15 to 20 bags of trash every two weeks, but getting the bags and other tools needed to do the work is a hassle, Tenn said, because those items are housed near the Coliseum in a building that has limited hours. 

“Couldn’t the city deliver that to volunteer groups,” she asked. “Couldn’t they provide some incentives, better support and maybe check in? The grabber tools they give us are terrible, so we ended up just purchasing our own.” 

Lawmakers craft a plan

Oakland City Council is supporting a bill by State Sen. Jesse Arreguín that would require individuals to resolve illegal dumping fines before renewing vehicle registration. This week, the Senate passed the bill, moving it to the Assembly.

Oakland leaders see it as a way to boost enforcement and deter dumping. Last year, Oakland issued 270 citations for illegal dumping, but only about 30 fines were paid. 

“This is a way that we think will increase collections,” Garland said, “People don’t want their vehicle registration delayed, and so it’ll be able to increase the compliance on the payment of those citations.” 

Some of those fines are generated by seven environmental enforcement officers, whose positions are like trash detectives. They sift through trash for information that connects it to a person, then they issue citations.

Looking ahead, Garland envisions collaborative efforts with school districts. He hopes every campus will have a dedicated representative who can escalate clean up requests when illegal dumping near a school has gone unaddressed. 

In a speech for his bill on the Senate floor, Arreguín, who represents Oakland, said illegal dumping is a statewide problem.

“This establishes a meaningful consequence for unpaid citations,” he said, “and, hopefully, will deter repeat illegal dumping, improve compliance and support cleaner and safer neighborhoods for everyone throughout California.”

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