Several haulers find that advances in equipment are increasing their profitability and putting them a step closer to complete automation.
Solid waste collection is one of those jobs that lends itself to partial automation, but achieving complete automation is an ideal that, at first glance, appears impossible to reach. A municipality or private refuse company can set conditions on how refuse is set out or access to it, but it’s very rare for each route to be free of exceptional situations. Advances in equipment, however, are moving the industry toward a scenario in which a single type of truck will be able to collect any type of refuse—conventional trash in a bag or container, large bulk items, yard waste and perhaps even recycling—regardless of how it is set out or what obstacles may make access difficult.
Several types of trash hauler trucks that have been introduced to the market in the past few years are offering a greater ability to access curbside trash of all types and in all types containers with improved automated collection arms, or more versatile configurations that suit a wide variety of refuse set out on a given route. Manufacturers are offering these design improvements without sacrificing efficiency, meaning that solid waste haulers can gain greater fleet utilization and enjoy a net improvement in collection productivity at the same time.
These improvements in equipment are providing refuse companies with multiple benefits. Trucks are completing routes more quickly, increasing truck utilization and the overall productivity of a refuse company, allowing them to keep pace with market growth—and profitably. Exceptional collection situations that may have previously warranted sending a separate truck or more manual labor are also handled with automation more routinely than ever. Last but not least, refuse companies are often discovering that they can accommodate company and market growth with their existing staff, while making working conditions safer and cutting costs that used to result from accidents.
Efficiency, Cost Savings
CLM Sanitation of Stockbridge, GA, is the largest residential refuse collector in the metropolitan Atlanta area and one of the largest in Georgia. Its focus on residential business makes it a natural for automation and the company has always been an early adopter of the latest efficiency-enhancing equipment anyway, notes Jason Becker, chief executive officer. It entered the realm of semi-automation several years ago by purchasing several 20-yard front-loading trucks with cart tippers and then increased its volumetric capacity per truck by adding 25-yard vehicles with dual cart tippers and later added 32-yard trucks.
As the company’s revenue grew, it began to gain the wherewithal to invest in more advanced automated equipment. With a significant number of subscription customers beyond its municipal contracts, the company operates in a highly competitive residential refuse collection environment. “Complete” automation became CLM’s next operational objective. In 2005, CLM began to gradually upgrade its fleet by replacing its older rear-loading trucks with more than a dozen automated side-loaders.
Becker and CLM Sanitation are nothing if not restless. Management found that even these new trucks were not giving the company the level of automation that it needed.
The automated side-loaders represented another step toward complete automation, but “Again, we found some inefficiencies,” says Becker. “It didn’t hold as much garbage as we liked. It also didn’t get the extra pickups that we needed on routes. In the subscription areas, we needed the side-loaders to get the boxes and bags outside of the can.” In early 2007, the company received a demonstration of a hybrid side-loading/front-loading truck from Curotto Can that uses a large hopper/arm attachment that is mounted on the front of the truck. In contrast, an automated side-loader is equipped with an arm mounted on the truck body, behind the driver’s cab. An automated side-loader may be more efficient and is clearly easier on the driver overall than manual collection, but Becker and CLM still saw room for improvement.
“Point of sight is so much better,” Becker argues. “It also allows you to swing around cars and get objects that are around cars and around mailboxes, and navigate cul-de-sacs much more easily than an automated side-loader. Trying to position an automated side-loader around a parked car, a mailbox or a cul-de-sac is very difficult because the arm is in the middle of the truck.” The point of sight provided in the company’s new trucks allows drivers to actually begin extending the arm before the truck comes to a full stop. This results in a shorter cycle time of reportedly four seconds, about one-third that of a typical automated side-loader.
The shorter cycle time is one component of greater efficiency for CLM. Becker points out that the new trucks also eliminate delays in collection that are due to human error. “It also tends to be a little cleaner,” he says. “You’re grabbing cans and it’s dumping them right into a body of a truck and so you don’t have that whole human factor of guys dropping them on the ground or slinging them up in there, or not putting the can back right or lids back on it.”
The most telling evidence of CLM’s smooth transition to automation is the fact that it was not necessary to educate residents about impacts that the new trucks would have on them. Educational efforts the company had made when introducing the automated side-loaders were deemed sufficient.
“When we were automating routes, we sent out tons of literature out to the residents that your route will now be automated and it’ll now be serviced by an automated arm and here’s where you need to place your cans,” says Becker. “We rerouted the routes so that they were all right-hand drive. The problem when you send out literature to customers is that they automatically expect their service to decrease and so they start preparing themselves and it creates a wave of phone calls. When we decided to switch from the automated side-loader, we decided not to send out any notification to our customers. It went off seamlessly—we didn’t have the first call from a customer. They didn’t even know that we automated. That, to me, is the best thing you can say about it—we were able to automate a route without telling our customers we did it.”
Houston Moves to Automation
In Houston, the city’s department of solid waste management has been increasingly automating its residential trash collection since 1993. In 2000, after a major public relations and educational initiative to gain residents’ cooperation with automated collection efforts, the department completed the transition. As part of the transition, it purchased more than automated side-loaders, reports Daniel Gutierrez, deputy director of support services for the department.
In 2002, adds Gutierrez, the department began looking for new side-loading trucks due to some body integrity problems with the first side-loaders purchased. The department accepted a bid from McNeilus Companies for new AutoReach automated side-loader trucks. More than five years later, the department uses more than 120 of them.
The McNeilus side-loaders are equipped with an articulating Allcan Grabber arm that extends 9 feet and has a lateral reach of 8 feet to either side; the arm dumps containers into a 5-yard hopper located behind the truck cab.
The trucks also have Pack-on-the-Go hydraulics, allowing Houston refuse haulers to compact loads better than was previously possible. “The McNeilus does compact better on average than what we had before—according to my last calculation—by 200 pounds per yard or more,” adds Gutierrez.
The trucks’ reach capability, combined with city ordinances that mandate where residents must place city-supplied containers while ensuring that obstacles don’t block them from the department’s trash haulers, is allowing the department to reap the efficiency improvements resulting from automation.
“Ultimately, automation improves your bottom line,” says Gutierrez. “We calculate that we operate $3 million to $4 million a year cheaper by automation than by manual or semimanual collection.” There are also aesthetic benefits to automated collection, he adds. “You do it once a week instead of twice a week and the neighborhood looks better because the containers are uniform.”
Collection Versatility
In Bismarck, ND, the city began purchasing MultiPack trucks—combined automated side-loaders and rear-loaders—from Heil Environmental Industries in 2003 as part of an overall move toward automation to reduce labor costs and injuries.
The reason for the choice of the MultiPack was that the city allows curbside collection of yard waste despite the presence of more than 20 disposal sites around Bismarck, notes Joe Keeler, maintenance supervisor for the city, which now has six of these trucks.
“We still get quite a bit of yard waste at the collection point,” Keeler points out. “It’s not mandatory, but we get a lot of grass and leaves thrown in with the garbage and we only give one can per household and that’s where the extra garbage comes in.”
Bismarck’s MultiPacks can pick up both conventional residential trash using an automated Python arm located between the cab and a 4-yard side loader hopper. The arm is equipped with an enclosed oil bath gearbox to reduce gear wear and the truck also has an “operate-in-gear-at-idle system” that provides enough power to operate the arm at engine idle speed and save up to a reported gallon of fuel an hour.
On many routes, says Keeler, the MultiPacks can pick up residential trash as well as yard waste and bulky items such as white goods and furniture, due to a 3.94-yard Formula 5000 tailgate and a payload capacity of 1,000 pounds per cubic yard. Keeler says that the MultiPacks also suit commercial collection, as the city collects trash from about 850 dumpsters. He adds that the city does have to use conventional rear-loaders for some of the older areas of town, however. “In the older part of Bismarck, the streets are really narrow and there’s double parking and we serve the alleys and narrow streets with two rear-loaders,” he says. “In the older part of town, it’s difficult to get the automated arm to the cans.”
CLM Sanitation has experienced even more common one-stop pickup for all residential items in Atlanta. The automated trucks it utilizes are equipped with large 4.6-yard hoppers on the front that can accommodate large items, such as furniture and appliances, which used to warrant sending out a second truck.
“We’ve got very efficient routes and the routes are very dense,” notes Becker, adding that the company has moved toward all-in-one residential trash collection as the rule. “We were finding that we were losing some production with the automated side-loaders because they wouldn’t hold as much garbage—drivers would have to break off and go to a dump site and then come back and finish a route rather than try to pick up their entire route, go to the dump, finish, and then come back.
“The other downside to an automated side-loader is that we’re versatile in our company; we’ve got municipal contracts, but we’ve got a lot of subscription business as well,” he continues. “Customers in the subscription areas were putting out bagged extra pickups, boxes, and things of that nature, that an automated side-loader wasn’t capable of picking up. We were sending out another truck behind and customers were paying extra for it. A rear-loader can show up and pick up all of that garbage while we were trying to find another piece of equipment.”
The large hoppers on CLM’s new trucks and the design of the arms provide the company with both greater capacity and the ability to pick up virtually any type of container—two major benefits for such a company that operates in a competitive subscription environment. The arm is compatible with 32- to 96-gallon containers and has a 500-pound capacity.
“Its tonnage gets us back up to a rear loader’s tonnage,” Becker points out. ‘We also like it because it can handle different types of cans; it can handle a personal can, it can pick up our cans and it also picks up extra pickups and it’s much easier to get the boxes and bags outside the cans. Now, we can send one driver. Instead of his only being able to get a bag or two and our can, he can get whatever is outside the can—it makes us much more efficient.”
Becker hints that CLM Sanitation’s next move may be obtaining more commercial refuse business. “We are a 100% residential company, but now we’ve got a truck that will do the residential market very well and it also allows us to break into the commercial market without having to buy two different types of trucks. We can take that Curotto Can off of the front and do commercial.”
Better, Safer Use of Labor
Keeler stresses that Bismarck saw an optimization of labor costs as the biggest long-term advantage of purchasing the all-in-one MultiPack trucks. “The reason we did try the MultiPacks and went to semi-automated trucks was to reduce manual labor and injuries,” he says, adding that labor shortages warrant a tightening up of staff to create an environment in which trash collectors take on more responsibility and grow professionally. “In the long run, it’s going to be a financial savings in labor costs.”
The most noticeable benefit from partial automation has been a significant reduction in injuries on the job, specifically back injuries from lifting trash, Keeler notes. Now the city needs two trash collectors per truck compared with three previously, he adds.
In Atlanta, Becker argues that CLM Sanitation’s move toward automation has been intended to not only reduce injuries but also elevate trash collectors from collectors to professional drivers. “Obviously, the sanitation industry is very laborious, and so the helpers on back tend to be where you find the most Worker’s Compensation claims and attendance issues, and so we were just trying to get to a more professional driver atmosphere and really elevate our work force as much as we can,” Becker says. “In general, there is a difference between a helper who’s throwing trash and a professional CDL driver.”
Becker adds that the company’s investment in automation has significantly reduced labor costs in the long run. “When you’re eliminating the extra labor you have on your rear-loading trucks, you’re reducing your labor costs by 15% to 20% and then there’s some extra savings you’re probably realizing with accidents and injuries that you probably don’t see—I’m figuring you’re probably saving another 15% to 20% there, too,” he says.
“The downside when you’re automating is that you’ve got to supply everybody with a container. Our customers were probably 90% containerized anyway, but if your routes aren’t containerized already, you’re going to have to put more containers out there. Some of your savings you get back on your Worker’s Comp and labor costs. Once you get your rotes completely automated, you’ll start seeing savings in time-off-of-work savings.”
For more information about trucks and equipment that can improve access and improve collection efficiency, visit these manufacturers’ Web sites: