A couple years ago the city gave us new trash cans designed for use with trash trucks that automatically pick them up and dump them into the truck. I’m familiar with the system used with these types of trash cans as it’s what they do in Oceano. Every trash day out there residents roll their trash cans out onto the street by the curb, the trash trucks come alongside, and a mechanical arm reaches out and grabs the trash can, hoists it up and dumps its contents into the truck. Now they only need one operator per truck, which is good for small town budgets but not so much for the workers.

That system isn’t going to work here in Baltimore and I’ve wondered what giving us those kinds of trash cans was buying the city. Trash here is usually picked up in the alleys, some of which are so old and so narrow the city needs trash trucks specifically made for them. There is no room on either side of the trash truck for those arms to reach out and pick up trash cans.

For almost two years now I’ve watched the trash workers roll our new trash cans out to the backend of your usual trash truck…the ones with an open back and a claw that comes out and compresses trash dumped into the back…lift them up over the open back of the truck and manually dump the trash inside of them, then roll them back to our backyards, It looked to me like all that was accomplished with the new trash cans was giving the workers something with wheels on it, but much heavier to lift and dump.

But there was a master plan after all and I’ve been seeing it now. On the backs of all those standard trash trucks the city has been installing devices that pick up the new trash cans and dump them into the back of the truck. The workers still have to roll the trash cans over to the back of the truck, but then these devices do the work of lifting and dumping. Then they roll the cans back to our yards.

Well, actually they just leave them in the alley and we have to put them back. (shrug)

It’s a neat idea and I can see where both the city and the unions like it. It doesn’t cost workers their jobs, it makes their jobs easier (no heavy lifting), and the city doesn’t have to buy all new trash trucks, just these add-on devices.