Your Friendly Neighborhood Trash Truck!

It’s a new world out there on the front lines of trash!



When you think of ‘green” you usually don’t think of a garbage truck. The colors associated with these behemoths that prowl our neighborhoods waking us up early in the morning are, let’s say, more in the brown to whatever color putrid is range. But new generation trucks can pick up the trash without trashing the planet.

New York City Dept of Sanitation has begun using new diesel hybrid electric collection trucks to pick up residential garbage in the Big Apple. The trucks run on diesel and electric batteries, use 30% less fuels than conventional trucks, hence save operating costs, and emit a lot less CO2 and pollutants.

I envisioned these trucks as nearly silent when running on electric, so the warm cheery sound of sanitation workers swearing and smashing cans into each other would ring more clearly through the neighborhood with no background diesel growl. But, the electric can’t run the truck itself; just help the diesel by capturing breaking energy, which then is reused to power the truck when it accelerates.

This is what makes a hybrid perfect for sanitation work- all the stopping and starting. Hybrids lose efficiency when run at a steady state; they perform best when capturing the energy expended by stop-start driving. Guess what a trash truck spends most of its time dong? Stopping and starting.

The department is putting models manufactured by erstwhile truck names like Mack, Crane Carrier, and Kenworth into service for NYC residents. NYC will test these different models both for trash pickup and snowplowing to find which model is most efficient overall before settling in on the models to serve the city.

According to a recent piece on the trucks in the New York Times, there were just 200 hybrid diesel trucks on the roads in 2006. That has jumped to nearly 5,000 expected to be on the roads next year, and that’s just the beginning.



And hybrids aren’t the only innovation in these big garbage gobblers. In our earlier video/blog Gimme Shelter from Methane: Passing Gas is Rude to the Planet!, we pointed out how landfill gas from the Waste Management facility in Altamont, CA, is being converted into  liquefied natural gas (LNG) and powering 300 trucks daily. Take that, smog!

So, while you may not be able to escape the loving poetic banter of sanitation workers in the early dawn light, and the gentle tinkling of can against truck, the sweet aroma of diesel fumes wafting with the aroma of last week’s garbage may become a thing of the past. May it come about faster than a New York minute.