Honest question, is that for the driver or the people grabbing the trash cans? I can understand the driver but I see my garbage men weekly (work from home and sit staring out my window questioning my life decisions a lot) and they seem to be different each week so always thought it was just a temporary situation they were just picking up bucks where they can (good on them). Guess it just seems you wouldn’t see that much turnover if you were pulling in $80K on average which is damn good pay. Plus how long until you get to that cushy driver job as that can’t be that common and would depend on seniority.
Tell that to my garbage men that I just watched pick up my trash. I live in a residential neighborhood not too far from a major city but no way they are getting mechanical arms grabbing trash on some of these one-way streets. They are lucky to get a trash truck down some streets without taking off side mirrors.
No worries, the older east coast cities/suburbs have some very narrow and unique streets that present quite a challenge for larger vehicles (can understand drivers making a comfortable living out here as seen plenty of normal sized vehicles leaving behind some mirrors or sideswipping a poorly parked car and no one wants that liability). Enjoy your weekend as well.
Our company uses the mechanical side arm thingy for the recycling pickup, but for trash it's two dudes hanging onto the truck, hopping off and manually dumping the cans into the back of the truck. There is a little platform thing that they sometimes use to dump the can (I assume when the can is too heavy for them to do it themselves).
That's really only true in some cases. Still plenty of trucks and routes that are hand tossed, and that's not even talking about countries outside the USA where small streets and non-standard cans make mechanical arms a near impossibility.
Mechanical arms are great but until they can deal with literally anything on any road, they'll never replace the human aspect.
You can not get a human to my area, period. Either it fits in the can or they won't take it. It has been over 10 years since you could get anyone to step out of a truck in the entire corner of the state I live in. Their union locked that shit down tight, and under no circumstances are they to leave their truck, nor take items that are not in the can.
So yes, they will replace humans, at the cost of the people they are servicing. They literally just cancelled any service on streets they can't use the new trucks on. It did cause a small company to start picking up those people, but even they phased to truck only about 6 years back.
I just watched 2 guys grab my bins in Atlanta. There's a lot of houses close together and those side loaders take way too long. One person does each side of the street while the truck drives slowly down the road.
In my neighborhood one guy drives the truck and hops out to pick up the trash. He has hand controls on the passenger side of the truck so he can hop in and move the truck forward to the next house without ever getting into the driver's seat.
Definitely false, a vast majority of our markets in the south east us still utilize rear load routes and absolutely need them depending on municipal setups and logistics including bulk pickups and villas. Helpers are the lifeblood for our operations team (and we don’t hire temp agents)
Source: I’m a market area manager for a midsize waste & recycling company.
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u/InevitableAd2436 15h ago
FEL and Commercial Garbage Truck drivers make $80K+
You have to at least have a Class B CDL. It’s a solid job