In my area it's a 4-5 man crew. One driving, two chucking the trash in the back and 1 or 2 guys running a street ahead to pull all the bins out onto the road to make it quicker for the other guys so they don't have to wrangle them over all the parked cars as well as lift them into the hopper
We have Republic services in my area and I’ve already had to get three replacement trash cans this year because the drivers keep dropping them from like 10-15 feet up after dumping them instead of just putting it down on the curb.
It’s like that where I am on the MD/DC border in Silver Spring, MD. My community is 150ish townhouses with cars parked between the yards/sidewalks and the road, so it would take hours with 1 or 3 person crews. I’ve never actually seen our trash folks, but recycling is always at least 5 people. No clue why I’ve been recycling multiple times and never seen trash, despite trash being twice a week and recycling being once. Our recycling is split paper and everything else, so maybe that makes a difference on how many people they need as well. Theoretically you’re supposed to have two bins and separate it yourself, but no one seems to know that so it seems like we’re the only ones who do it and that’s only cause we asked them right after we moved in when we noticed they were separating and throwing it in different sides of the truck.
Just narrow inner city streets that are filled with cars bumper to bumper on either side. The truck blocks a huge part of the road so the quicker it passes through the better. Having two guys lift hundreds of super heavy full bins both over/around the cars and then move the back off the road is much slower than having a small team be ahead of them and put any bins that are hard to reach in a more convenient place. Cuts down on missed pick ups too as they hunt for the see bins. But no it's the mafia that's rorting the system for the sake of one garbage man's salary.
I've lived places like this. It's actually as close as you get to the idea of a "force multiplier" in garbage, recycle or yard waste collection when you see these guys run an operation like this. Picture it like this:
Your side of the street has like 20 houses, townhomes, whatever, but this is often more an urban area thing. Narrower streets. So you'll see 1-2 guys come round the corner and start yanking stuff out like advance scouts. They move at a brisk pace, you actually gotta be pretty fit it looks like or you're going to end up being that. Plus you're hauling and lifting 20-50 pound stuff all day so extra fitness there.
Maybe 1-2 minutes behind them will be the truck with 1-2 guys in back and a driver. By those guys not having to do the moving, and just grabbing what's there--they go a bit faster. Say it's the difference between 30 seconds and 40 seconds at a site/house.
Not much, right? But when you scale it out area-wide and all day they absolutely save money/time by throwing the extra labor out.
I know it's counter intuitive but it works. I actually watched (don't even ask why) a video on this once by some midwest department that did this explaining it, probably because people asked. They're basically giving garbage the Henry Ford treatment.
This makes sense. I forgot I live in a “Wisteria Lane” neighborhood that looks like a Hollywood TV set and restricts street parking. On garbage day all bins are alinged to the curb and the robo gripper arm doesn’t even break a sweat. A one-man garbage truck does it all.
We have private collection. There's about a dozen haulers, not a single one does manual collection anymore. It started about 15 years ago with waste management. It's all single man operations trucks with arms. For whatever reason the unions didn't fight them on it. I would guess because the job sucked for the two guys outside in our very cold winters.
201
u/fubuki_ Aug 26 '21
This is still very common.