In the not-so-distant past, all types of household waste were simply thrown into the gaping mouth of a garbage truck by two fit & healthy guys, riding on the truck’s rear steps. The only exceptions were paper and cardboard, everything else went straight to a landfill site.
Two classic, non-selective waste collectors are on display in the DAF Museum, both of them date back to the sixties. Are you ready for a load of rubbish?
Starting in 1964 with this DAF G 1300 and a Geesink roltrommel (rolling drum). The DAF is powered by the truck maker’s DA 475 engine, that’s a naturally aspirated, 4.77 liter inline-6 diesel engine. Maximum power output 100 SAE-hp.
On the drum’s sides it says Do not throw garbage on the street.
The Geesink body can contain up to 17 m³ (600 ft³) of garbage, which roughly weighs 6 metric tons (13,000 lbs).
DAF’s G-chassis was introduced in 1952. For better maneuverability and a tighter turning radius, it had a set-back front axle. Set back substantially, I must add, resulting in more front overhang than on a usual Euro-cabover.
The cab was developed in cooperation with Van Dijk’s Carrosseriefabriek, the company also built these cabs. The compartment with the big doors and roll-down shutters was filled with larger items, left on the curb.
This is why it was called a rolling drum; compacting garbage by gravity, thus making room for more load while the truck was on the job. For unloading, the drum’s back part -pivoting at the top- opened and the garbage was dumped. According to Geesink’s website, their rolling drum was introduced in the late thirties.
The standard, zinc garbage bins as used throughout the country back then.
The bins were hung on a bracket, after which they could be easily tipped for emptying.
Parked next to the G 1300 was this 1968 DAF A 1900 with a much bigger and more modern Faun body. The 1900 was the heaviest of the venerable “Frog-DAF” series. Many of them are still around, owned and driven by classic DAF truck collectors and enthusiasts.
The truck is rated at a maximum gross weight of 15,200 kg (33,510 lbs). Its power unit is a 120 SAE-hp, DD 575 diesel engine. An inline-6, naturally aspirated, with a displacement of 5.76 liter.
At the landfill site, the garbage was pressed out of the cargo area. This fully restored garbage truck was owned by the Van Gansewinkel company.
The zinc bins era ended around 1970. Henceforward, all household waste was put in plastic bags, tied up with any piece of rope. The fit & healthy guys grabbed as many bags as they could and slang them into the truck in one fluid motion.
This really looks like a black hole…
…which it is, in a way. Throw something in and you’ll never see it again.
The Faun equipment was powered by this PTO at the front.
Fast forward to 2020. Selective waste collection has been the norm for quite some time now. And meanwhile, full-EV garbage trucks have also arrived. Like this recently introduced DAF CF Electric 6×2 with VDL E-Power. Electric trucks and tractor units for city work will become the new norm, let there be no doubt about that.
Related article:
What was the purpose of the compartment at the back of the cab of the 1964, if not for selective waste pickup?
Loading it with anything that didn’t fit in the zinc bins yet was dumped in a landfill just as well. I’m thinking of the large “one-piece” items like furniture.
I like that electric truck at the end – I wouldn’t mind seeing those on the street here in Toronto. No smoke and a lot less noise.
Back in the late fifties/early sixties, when I was growing up in small town Kentucky, it was expected that every household would burn their waste and then the town’s garbage trucks would pick up the ashes. The older, more settled areas of town, tended to have alleys behind the houses so that at least the barrels were out of sight. In the newer, post WWII development where we lived there were no alleys so each house had a rusty barrel at the curb.
As it happened my father worked for a chemical processing company that had hundreds, if not thousands, of empty barrels that employees could take at will. Anytime someone on our block needed a new barrel my father would grab one from the stack and bring it home. The downside was that these barrels had once contained who knows what kind of chemicals; compounds that I later heard described as “methyl ethyl bad stuff”. The barrels were not cleaned out or anything so the first few times they were lit off unknown carcinogens were released into the atmosphere. Life was much simpler then, and not necessarily in a good way.
Burning and/or burying, indeed, that was the usual way of getting rid of stuff in the more rural areas.
Where I grew up in Sydney Australia, Randwick Council collected the rubbish in the back of open tray Bedford J series trucks. One ‘garbo’ (garbage collector, garbologist) would throw it into the open tray, and there’d often be one (in wellington boots) stomping around in the back of the truck with all the garbage. It was that way at least until the late 60s, maybe into the 70s too.
These trucks show a very different approach to packing the load than the Garwaood or Leach hydraulic ram designs found in North America. While smaller versions are still around for rural routes most residential work is done by side lift trucks that pick up and dump the wheelie bins at the front and dump out the rear at the transfer station. Large dumpsters for commercial use are also typically picked up by a forklift attachment that allows one man operation unlike the old practice of hooking the dumpster to a rear wnd packer and using a winch to tilt the dumpster into the truck.
Question. Anyone know the name of that cool building behind the truck in the last picture? It is beyond awesome and I would like finding out more.
It’s hard to tell, but I believe that is Santiago Calitrava’s El Museu de les Ciències Príncipe Felipe at the Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències in Valencia, Spain.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Arts_and_Sciences
BEO
I believe that’s the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, Spain.
A few years ago, our town which runs its own “resource recovery” (aka garbage) services, collection and landfill, added a few new hydraulic hybrid trucks. They are supposed to be quieter but sometimes during the power cycle they can be very loud … and our first pickup is around 5:30 AM. They use a two sided collection body, and pick up trash and green waste in one run, then come back and pick up the single stream recyclables (glass, plastic, paper) a few hours later. I miss the old days, even through about the year 2000, when the trash collectors rode on the back of the truck with huge wheels bins and ran down driveways to pick up trash right at the house, even behind closed gates if asked to do so. Probably not a fun job, but some of those guys were amazingly fit and would jog down the street with loaded bins, picking up at several houses before emptying their bins, while the truck crawled along the street.
One of the earliest Matchbox models I can remember was similar to the featured truck, they must have used the same system in England.
Indeed. The increasing size of the Matchbox Refuse vehicles reflects the rising scale of household waste and how to deal with it from the late ’50s to late ’70s quite neatly.
What are the skid-ski looking things under the chassis? Surely not for the garbos to stand on, as there’s no handholds.
I’d say it’s a combination of an underride (or underwalk) guard and a “skid-ski plate”, protecting the exhaust, diesel tank and such.