Getting Specifications Right

“Be careful what you do ... or Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you.” —Vachel Lindsay, “The Congo”

Los Angeles specifies power windows on new refuse-collection trucks so drivers won’t bang their knees on the cranks that open the manual windows.

Wittenberg Disposal Services LLC, a private hauler serving 52,000 households in Appleton, Green Bay, and 63 other Wisconsin communities, specifies power mirrors and light-emitting diode (LED) lights for maximum visibility.

Wittenberg’s president, Jim Hartleben, also insists on a locking rear end to help his trucks avoid bogging down. “Landfills—especially municipal landfills—aren’t always the friendliest places,” he explains. “The differential lock ties a truck’s wheels together so one doesn’t spin without the other if you get into soft ground.”

Miami, FL, specifies an automatic lubrication system on its new refuse-collection trucks. “Automatic lubrication gives you a longer life expectancy on the chassis, and putting lubricant in the automatic system is less taxing than getting our personnel to lubricate all the different parts,” says Mario Soldevilla, director of Miami’s solid waste department.

In Big Spring, TX, driver complaints led to specification changes for dual-steering automated side-loaders. “The manufacturer puts in the standard left-hand steering on the assembly line,” says Todd Darden, Big Spring’s public-works director. “Then the vendor gives the truck to a third party to install the right-hand steering. Our drivers complained that the right-hand-drive controls were loose. Also, because of the way [the controls] were positioned, the drivers had trouble watching the arm on the right side of the truck latch onto the containers.”

Compaction Complaints
As these examples illustrate, writing specifications that yield cost-effective and user-friendly collection trucks challenges the ingenuity of everyone involved in the specifying process for a municipality or a private hauler. “These are expensive pieces of equipment to run,” says Pierre Barbour, deputy finance director in New Haven, CT. “It’s so difficult to put a good working product on the street and keep it on the street every day.”

Barbour is on a five-person committee that writes and revises New Haven’s refuse-collection truck specifications. The committee looks at what has worked well in the past and what has not worked well. “Every brand deserves a look, but some in the past have been problematic for us,” Barbour says.

New Haven’s fleet consists of eight rear-loading refuse trucks, a tipper-arm side-loader for collecting from schools, and four side-loader recycling trucks. “The rear seals on the vehicles begin to wear, and we get this mix of waste being spewed on the street. The spillage and odors cause lots of citizen complaints, and stopping for cleanups becomes a problem.”

Some of New Haven’s refuse trucks are 15–18 years old. “You get good money chasing bad after a while,” Barbour says. “The optimum from a fiscal standpoint is a replacement cycle of eight to 10 years, given the wear and tear on equipment that has to stop and go constantly. We’ve gotten a lot better about replacing our equipment with a shorter life cycle.”

Writing new specifications for trucks can challenge the ingenuity of everyone involved.

Input From Drivers
Drivers have no say in New Haven’s specification process, though Barbour says he would like very much to see them involved. “They’re the ones who have to operate this equipment,” he notes. “We’d like to keep [the trucks] on the road longer without having to come in for repairs.”

At the other extreme, the truck-selection committee in the Los Angeles sanitation bureau includes drivers and mechanics as well as managers. The committee writes detailed specifications, which go to all of the city’s drivers for a month-long comment period. The typical specification document is about 40 pages of single-spaced type, and some aspects refer to industrial codes from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and other standard-setting bodies that contain even more extensive requirements.

“We take the previous specifications as a starting point,” says Alex E. Helou, division manager for solid resources support services. “We know how many tons we want the truck to hold, the wheelbase, the number of engine cylinders and liters, and the transmission, and exhaust requirements. We list all of these things.

“The drivers have a lot of input with respect to cab comfort. They are big guys sitting in trucks eight or nine hours a day. We include air conditioning, and air-ride seats to reduce the impact on their backs. The trucks have backup and side cameras with small LCD [liquid crystal display] screens on the dashboard. We want to locate the screens so they’re comfortable for the drivers to view, and the drivers help make those decisions.”

“Some of our guys have grown to great proportions from rich city living,” notes Allen Roker, assistant director of operations for Miami’s solid waste department. The truck cabs must accommodate burly men who weigh more than 300 pounds and stand as tall as 6 feet and 8 inches—and also some women drivers as short as 5 feet and 3 inches. “All sizes must fit inside the cab and comfortably reach the controls,” Roker says.

Flexibility Varies
In the public sector, specification writers may describe in exquisite detail the characteristics of vehicles they want to buy, but the bidding process typically doesn’t let them express a preference for a particular make and model. “I may like Cummins diesels, but I can’t really say that I want a Cummins diesel in my truck,” says Walter B. Coley, superintendent of waste management in Norfolk, VA.

“The lowest bidder that meets the specifications, that’s what we go by,” says Barbour in New Haven. “If something is seriously defective [in that product], we will disqualify it if we have to, but it usually doesn’t get to that point.”

Miami is systematically replacing a fleet of 32 automated side-loader trucks. Most refuse-collection trucks have the drivetrain in back, because that’s where the weight is, and Miami’s new specifications require rear-wheel drive. “It was easy to spec the new version of what we wanted,” Soldevilla says. “We went traditional and looked for the best performance we could buy.” The new side-loaders combine a chassis from Sterling Truck Corp. of Redford Township, MI, with a CP Python body from Heil Environmental Industries Ltd. of Chattanooga, TN.

Preferences Honored
Private haulers have more flexibility to accommodate their drivers’ preferences and to pay more initially for a vehicle that will last longer and cost less to maintain throughout its life. “For some long-term drivers, we try to buy a vehicle they’ll be comfortable with,” says Hartleben. “They’re out every day and have a feel for what’s going to work in the communities we serve.”

Bavarian Trucking Co. Inc., located in Walton, KY, runs a 50-truck fleet to service 30,000 customers in northern Kentucky and in four Ohio counties near Cincinnati. “Most of our drivers have been here 20 years,” says Stephen C. Bruggemann, shop foreman. “They act like a new truck is something they would buy for themselves because they’re working on it. They have to be able to defend their opinion to me, the buyer. They’ll drive one, and we’ll discuss it.

“We bought a new Mack for one of our drivers in 2004 because he insisted it was what he wanted. He liked the tailgate seal on the rear door, the top door, the controls, and the faster arm. It saves three seconds on a dump—reaching for a container, hoisting and emptying it, and bringing it back down.” Three seconds isn’t much, but in a year it amounts to 23.33 hours, based on 100 containers a day for 280 workdays.

Bavarian normally buys two or three trucks a year. “That’s growth,” Bruggemann says. “We don’t replace vehicles. We’ll retire a truck after it’s 22 to 24 years old and move it to the landfill to haul water for dust control.”

The City of Big Spring, TX, wrote new specs for its dual-steering side-loaders.

Driver input played an important role in the new specs for Big Spring’s trucks.

The Ideal Truck
Despite the variety of available refuse-collection truck configurations, many specification writers have unfulfilled wishes. Some features they want aren’t on the market, even on a custom basis.

Hartleben is seeking a solution to trash that blows out of side-loader trucks on the road. “The issue isn’t driving 60 miles per hour to the landfill; it’s driving at pickup speed—15 miles per hour to 20 miles per hour—between stops,” he says. “Paper will blow out of some bodies more than others. We know which are which. Some bodies we won’t utilize because of that.” Hartleben has put screens on certain vehicles, but he thinks the real solution would be a hydraulic door to close between stops on a windy day, even though opening and closing such a door would lengthen the pickup cycle.

Darden’s pet peeve is a lack of fit between the rollout trash containers and the pickup arms on the collection trucks. “The designs are changing constantly, and I don’t think the container people visit with the body manufacturers,” he says. “We’ll buy 50 containers for demonstration purposes and find they don’t work, so we’re left with our field techs and mechanics trying to make them work. Every retrofit I have to do to the mechanical arms costs us time and money.”

John Childress, superintendent of solid waste collection and recycling in Fairfax County, VA, wants manufacturers to standardize the size and location of such things as steps and grab handles on rear-load packer trucks, power takeoff controls, and window controls. “I drive a Chevy truck at work, and my personal vehicle is a Chevy truck,” he says, “but the window controls are different. One I push down to raise the window; the other I push down to lower the window.”

The ideal result of specs should be a user-friendly, cost-effective vehicle.

Bruggemann laments the trend toward lighter, less durable materials. Four years ago a competitor ordered several trucks that he didn’t need, and he persuaded Bavarian to buy them instead. They were built to specifications less rigorous than Bavarian’s own. “The cab doors and the posts where the doors hinge get out of whack easily,” Bruggemann says. “The doors require readjustment on a weekly basis if the driver doesn’t watch what he’s doing. There is so much more plastic on the doors. We try to make something last as long as possible. It seems like the new age is not focused on that at all. It’s focused on light weight and fuel efficiency, but that drives up the cost of maintenance and repairs. You pay for it on one end or the other.”

Coley would like to see a detachable tipper for rear-loaders. Trucks now come with or without a tipper, and if it’s there when a truck is collecting only yardwaste, it gets in the way, he says.

“The truck of my dreams would burn alternative fuel and do it efficiently,” Coley says. “With ultra-low-sulfur fuels and biodiesel, fuel economy goes down, which makes it not as cost-effective as regular diesel. Somebody suggested that a truck should burn garbage for fuel. It would be a rolling incinerator.”

Coley also wants automated trucks to be less maintenance intensive. “A hose or a wire to one of the relay switches gets pinched, and then the mechanics are troubleshooting,” he complains.

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Soldevilla suggests replacing relay switches with solid-state circuitry, which he says would provide a simpler way to diagnose problems and be easier to maintain and replace.

Soldevilla also yearns for “the ultimate in a lower-cost, higher-performance vehicle. It would be robotic without the human feature—no driver.” But, he concedes, such a feature isn’t likely to appear anytime soon.

Author's Bio: George Leposky is a science and technology writer based in Miami, FL.