Automated side loaders, we’re talking about garbage trucks, are RHD. The reason is obvious, when looking at the picture: the driver is sitting on the side where the action takes place. This only applies to right-driving countries, which is the right thing to do where I live.
Since it’s RHD, I simply assume this 2018 DAF CF 340 FAN was built in the UK, in the former Leyland trucks lorries production facilities. There’s a 340 DIN-hp, 10.8 liter inline-six under its day cab, known as the MX-11 engine.
These days, all regular sized garbage trucks have three axles. They either have a single wheeled, steering and liftable pusher axle or a ditto tag axle. A pusher axle is ahead of the drive axle, a tag axle is behind it. No place for traditional 6×2 chassis in the garbage collection world of twisting & turning all day long, often in tight spots.
The side loader grabs a wheeled bin with a green lid, which means it’s a collection day for the kitchen and garden leftovers. All bins have to be placed on the same side of the road, so that the truck has to drive through the streets only once.
Our wheeled-bin-trio. Glass and “restgarbage” have to be brought to (separate) underground containers at a location nearby. The restgarbage ends up in a blazing fire, inside a huge oven, generating electricity. Everything else is recycled in another way.
So the driver is sitting on the right…watch out for that precious 2002 Hyundai Atos with its 999 cc engine on the left!
The complete garbage collection equipment was supplied by Geesink, a brand of the Geesink Norba Group. The truck’s curb weight is roughly the same as its payload capacity, both are just over 13 metric tons (28,660 lbs).
About 10 minutes later, I caught this LHD micro sized garbage truck, a 2016 DFSK (Dongfeng Sokon) K01H with a Van den Born body. It’s registered as a dump truck, so that’s how it unloads. The DFSK is powered by a 1,310 cc, four-cylinder engine, running on CNG (compressed natural gas).
The little truck was too far ahead, I could only take a picture of its rear side, but this is how it looks from another angle. Same brand, model and bodywork.
Today’s bonus: a 2009 DAF CF 85.410 FTG tractor with a Nooteboom semi-trailer, delivering steel plates at the shipyard. An older CF-series model, also with a day cab. No need to use the tractor’s Hiab crane to unload, as the shipyard has plenty of cranes of their own.
How does Dar’s slogan translate (en ‘t is weer fris!)?
Dar… and it’s fresh again!
Correct! ‘t is short for het (het is = it is)
DAR = Duurzaam Afval, grondstof en (openbaar) Ruimtebeheer. That’s the full name of the garbage collector in the Nijmegen region. Oh wait, that asks for even more translation…
I can’t quite understand why side-loading trash trucks aren’t more common here in the US. Every jurisdiction or private hauler around here that I’m aware of uses rear-loading trucks… it requires the trash crew to move the bins to the truck’s rear, and then either use the truck’s loading arm… or just manually dump the bin into the trash hopper. Since it’s time consuming to use the loading arm, the crews often just manually dump the bins into the hopper, which of course risks more workplace injuries.
Seems like with a side-loader, all of that is much easier. Other than simple historical inertia, I’m not sure why side-loaders aren’t used much.
And I’ve never seen a micro sized garbage truck before. I assume it’s for uses such as picking up trash from places like city parks?
We have side-loaders, and while it’s not at all difficult, there are a few rules about where you have to place cans so the arm can reach them, and stuff that can’t be near them, etc, and inevitably tons of people can’t follow the rules.
The trucks are more expensive too, but since they typically run a crew of at least 1 fewer haulers, I assume there’s a cost savings over time.
I would say the main advantage though & why we should all be using the automated side-loaders is safety. The manual rear loaders are surprisingly dangerous, to say nothing of having people walking around a moving blind spot, in traffic. In my old neighborhood with rear loading trucks, one of the workers was struck & killed by a resident’s car a couple years ago.
You still have rear loaders? How odd and quaint. Nothing but side loaders here for quite some years. I can’t imagine how the vastly improved efficiency and economics makes sense to keep rear loaders still in operation.
We have some mini sized garbage trucks for the folks who live in our little gravel alleys. But it’s on a typical Isuzu chassis.
I know I’ve seen side-loaders in other places, but here in Virginia I’ve never seen one in use. Our trash, recycling and yard waste are all collected by rear-loaders, as they are in other jurisdictions around here. Our trash trucks are 2012-vintage Macks, so they’re relatively recent purchases, too.
Yeah I haven’t seen a rear loader in residential applications in a long time. What services my neighborhood are front loaders, like you would see servicing dumpsters, but the container they have on the forks is short and has a bin dumper on the side. In this service area the wheeled bins are rented and not mandatory, so they need something that will do both.
In the city where they used the side loaders bins and recycling are wrapped up in the bill with water from the city (and inflated) so they can run side loaders exclusively.
In PA, still rear-loading. We also have street parking – that arm won’t reach over a line of cars, The garbage men still have to drag the cans to the street, empty them, and maybe return them to the general vicinity where they originated from.
When it was mentioned micro garbage truck, i thought of the three-wheeled ones in use in india – they use small ones to cart garbage to where they can transfer to much larger ones: https://static.toiimg.com/thumb/msid-66453715,imgsize-284614,width-400,resizemode-4/66453715.jpg
The grabber is extendable and can also pick up a bin from the curb in case of parked cars.
Of course, provided that the cars aren’t parked the “Paris way”, bumper to bumper.
That’s the problem here in New York. OTOH, all of our 2,500 Mack LR heavy sanitation trucks double as snow plows, and can clear most of the city in an hour. In the 17 years since I moved back, only one storm, with 35″ on Christmas night 2009, brought them to a standsill.
Same here in SoCal, side loaders only for at least 20 years.
Many of the trucks in our area are dual drive, so where needed they will hop behind the wheel on the “wrong” side and then when heading to the transfer station or back to base they’ll hop in the (US) driver’s side.
However I know that in the city where I own a house that has the mandatory bins so they can use the side loader where they drive from the regular position and use the cameras to line up and grab.
The ones here are mostly dual drive side loaders.
All DAF XF and CF are produced in Eindhoven (and Belgium for the cab) while LF is prodeced in the UK
Not according to DAF’s own website:
…”Leyland is the manufacturing site for DAF’s light and medium duty LF vehicle range, as well as heavy duty CF and XF models”…
https://www.daf.com/en/about-daf/daf-worldwide/production-locations
Side loading in this style and lining up the bins in a regular line and consistently oriented – never seen that before.
Ours are normally 3 axle Mercedes or DAF with a a crew of 3-5, one driving, 2-4 running around pushing bins to the back and having them hoisted up to empty. Your bin ends up where it ends up, but our guys are pretty good and it’s not normally very far away.
Third axle often steerable nowadays – always helps in small spaces
The front of our house shot 3 minutes ago (it just happens to be garbage day). Blue is garbage, green is recycling, and the gray is yard debris. All picked up automatically by sideloaders with just a driver. For well over a decade now. Going on 20 years, actually, at least when it started.
Yeah the city I mentioned above looks like that on certain days of the week and has been near 20 years since they went to that method.
That’s an unusual color coding! Our blue is recycling, green is yard debris, and gray or black or brown, an indeterminate lay dark color that seems to fade to different tones with age, is trash. I thought the green and blue was universal in the US. As for truck type, most residential curbside in my part of California is side load, with one truck for trash and yard waste, and one for mixed recycling. Some more rural areas, with narrow private roads (common in the our local mountains) where bins are taken by the homeowner to a collection point at a wider spot on the county road, are served by rear loaders that are hand-loaded. It doesn’t seem that long ago, maybe 1999, when the collectors stopped coming down our driveway and dumping our unwheeled bins into their giant rolling aluminum bins, that took several households’ trash, and then lifted those bins to tip them into the truck. The workers just chased the truck down the street all day … they were phenomenally fit. My perception is that the plastic “wheely bins” were common in Europe long before the US.
In my area blue is recycling and green is garbage while compostable is grey.
Those barrels can’t destroy the view of a lovely tended front yard Paul and Stephanie!
The rear loaders, which were also used to empty wheeled bins, always had a crew of 3 here. The driver and 2 guys riding along on the truck’s rear steps, covering both sides of the road. Throwing in the garbage bags or hooking up the wheeled bins and rolling them back to their original position (curb, drive-way).
It amazes me how (at least in the U.S) under-appreciated refuse collectors are. I remember the New York garbage strikes in the 1970’s when it was only a matter of two days before trash piled high on the sidewalks.
Around theres a mixture sideloaders for wheelie bins and rear loaders for green waste side loaded rubbish bag trucks single operator stands on the left to drive and throws the bags in, everything is contracted out and privatised its inefficient and possibly more costly in the long run, the garbage trucks are a mixed bunch too, some are used imports from Japan some started here new as cab chassis 4×2 and had the equipment remounted from a truck that wore out under it, rear loading compactors are usually used imports Fusos and Isuzus the bigger side loaders Hinos or Isuzus they are cheap and reliable mostly.
We have sideloaders collecting wheelie bins like this in my part of Australia. They came in back in the nineties.
I love the idea of having all bins on the one side of the street. That makes a lot of sense. We’ll often hear the trucks go past, go to collect the bin only to find they’ve been doing the other side of the street. 🙁
We have a weekly recyclable collection (all in the one bin), and fortnightly for other garbage – supposedly to encourage us to recycle. Ha! Council’s too cheap to pay the contractor for weekly collection. And huge fees at the tip.
The blue bin: emptied every month. The others every 2 weeks. During summer months, the green one (smelly and rotting stuff…) every week.
Restgarbage goes in a bag, do be dumped (by yourself) in an underground container nearby, see below.
€ 0,75 for every time you open it. Every household has a plastic “credit card”, to be used to open the rolling drum.
Glass and often also clothes: underground containers, no separate costs.
Scrap metal (in my town): just place it on the curb, a scrap metal dealer will pick it up soon enough.
Large items, batteries, chemical waste, etc.: to be brought to the municipal’s recycle station.
Landfills don’t exist anymore, something from the past. The bottom-line: recycle, recycle, recycle…
This is how they empty an underground container:
I’m sorry but it just seems like another case where things are just to complicated, and costs too high. I get the idea to push recycling but that underground container seems like the logistics far out weigh any benefits.
However that is a far better solution than in Spain where my daughter was living for the last 9 months. There they seem to have community dumpsters or bins in random places. My daughter in the small town had to walk a couple of blocks to the nearest dumpster. In the big cities they were closer together. Places to recycle were also very rare. A shock to us from the PNW where curbside recycling caught on early relatively for the US.
I’m sorry things are getting too complicated once again, I must live in another galaxy.
There are stations (mostly double) throughout the whole municipal, it’s not that the truck is there every day just to have a look or that is has to drive around a whole working day to empty only a few of them.
In the end, these are just underground dumpsters for the neigborhood. Safe and clean. I dump a bag of restgarbage every 6 to 8 weeks.
Well that video shows that it does take a while to dump one of those units, so I can’t imagine they can empty that many in a shift.
Those underground vaults and containers that record the payment can’t be cheap and that truck also is going to be much more expensive to purchase and maintain than a typical garbage truck.
Around 3 minutes to empty one, I’d say (given the length of the video).
It’s a standard chassis-cab with a garbage collection body and a highly common PTO driven crane behind the cab. I don’t see that much extra costs compared to the side- or front loaders.
Best wishes to you, sent from my galaxy.
Great write up. I wonder if garbage trucks overseas have such a mobster connotation as in the US. A scene forever burned into my psyche is from Goodfellas by Martin Scorsese. The scene shows them “disposing” of bodies in a garbage truck while playing Eric Claptons coda/outro of Layla.
In this case, the DAR (the collector) is owned by 6 municipals. Naturally, forming the exact region covered by said garbage collector.
We have a choice of refuse haulers at our home in OH…ours uses the wheeled bins that are grabbed by mechanized arms and dump into a front bin. No different recycling bin. The other company uses rear loading trucks and men moving the bins and a separate recycling bin. In FL, there’s one company but I can pile up to 4 yards of yard waste at the curb EVERY week if I like and they manually put it in the truck. They pick up trash, recycling and yard waste all the same day but different trucks. Regional differences for sure, just like concrete trucks…big conventional McNeilus Bridgemasters on Volvo chassis in STL, lots of front-dump trucks with little tiny cabs in Cincinnati.
As per usual, regular sized garbage trucks are based on European (and European only) mid-size truck models. Every truck maker offers one, like the DAF CF, Volvo FM and Scania P-series. Day cabs only.
AY! DIS IS NOO YAWK. All weez got iz rear loadahs. We also have low cab forward recycling trucks, but again, manually loaded (or thrown) in the rear. It’s a dirty, gritty job. We make sure to tip our private hauler’s men every Christmas. In NOO YAWK many of the garbage collectors like to call themselves CARTERS. I used to call on refuse haulers in my days selling trucks. I enjoyed them. They were down to earth folks. Imagine some 5’6″ college kid calling on refuse haulers and selling them chassis! I did it and I enjoyed it.
Another dutchman here, living in the big city, and here it is rearloaders only, with the three men crew mentioned above. Guess sideloaders only work in the correct location where you can place the bins the right way. Also lots of underground stations here, but not in all parts of the city. (yet?)