There’s different types of garbage trucks. Frontloaders,backloaders and sideloaders. I drove a sideloaders, which is typical for collecting house bins. My truck had an arm on the side that i controlled with a joystick. Ideally, I wouldn’t leave the cabin all day. The arm had a grabber that could grab two bins at a time. The arm itself had a weighing mechanism in it to weigh the bin. Some municipalities also required we’d check if the bins were registered and payd for, so the bin had a chip my arm could scan. That was always a hassle, because you had to grab the bin just right, or else you wouldn’t be able to read the chip.

The big container on the back was interchangeable. It had its own weighing system, but it really depends on what you load, how much weight you can take. For instance a full container for a paper route would weigh much less than a full contauner on a greens route. The weighing was only aan indication. I would know by experience when the container would be almost full. When the container was full, I could go to a change point close to my location. The company would drop a trailer with 3 empty co tainers for me and my colleagues. We could change out our co tainer when we’re full and so.eone else woud come pick it up. Usually we’d give them a quick call when the last co tainer was changed, so they wouldn’t have to wait for nothing. In a busy season, we would get 2 or 3 change containers. Driving back to headquarters and changing there happened, but only rarely. That could take an hour or more.

Sometimes we’d have to bring our loads not to headquarters, but to the actual garbage burning facility. Than we’d have to do the classic weigh-in weigh-out.

One strange thing I remember well is when I rode a backloader for a plastic route. I had a colleague who stood on the back and picked up all the bags of plastic trash on the street and throw it in the back. In the meantime he’d carefully rummage through them all ti look for valuables. He often found toys for his grandkids,never anything really valuable, as far as I know. But it was weird enough for me to remember it.

Another one was an incident. The sideloader arm I mentioned previously, has a very big and complicated hydrolics system. One day the hydrolics broke. Its a 1 by 1 meter big chest next to the sideloader arm and it just sprung open and started spraying oil everywhere. I didn’t know what to do, since I’m not a mechanic, so I didn’tdo anything. I couldn’teven drive a tually,because the whoke truck was freaking out. I was parked right in front of someone’s house (was trying to pickup their bin), leaking oild all over their garden. Eventually they had to send in a cleanup crew to dig up the whole garden 2 meter deep to clean out the soil. It was an environmental incident. The occupants of the house didn’t notice anything, because they were on vacation. I can only imagine what their home coming was like.