Recycling collections are becoming increasingly sophisticated, with advances in vehicle design playing a crucial role. Charles Newman explores some of the new ideas that are emerging 

Once upon a time, there was one truck that came down your street to pick up rubbish. These days, what with green waste, brown waste, dry recyclables, there’s potential for a whole lot more traffic. Cue visions of householders angrily waving their rolled up copies of the Daily Mail.

What’s more, recycling is now, in many places, the biggest game in town, and as we’ve just noted, it’s not a single amorphous entity like residual waste. To gather an increasingly wide range of materials efficiently, in a way that doesn’t clog up the streets, a new breed of trucks has emerged: all hail the one-pass recycling collection vehicle.

The key characteristic is an ability to take food waste alongside dry recyclables in one pass. On this basis many councils now fulfill Defra’s wish to see smelly waste picked up once a week. Exactly how they choose to do this – the basket of materials to opt for, 
et cetera – can vary tremendously, yet getting the right vehicle design is vital for a successful operation.

“Each build these days tends to be bespoke for the customer, in terms of the splits in the body, the body sizes, the range of options that they choose, even the body design”, notes Sheldon Hall, UK Marketing Manager for vehicle manufacturer Terberg Matec. “Things have moved on. It’s about clients having a better idea about what they want, for instance in the splits of the streams they are collecting and the weights of the streams they are collecting, the density and all the rest of it.”

The result is vehicles that fall into two broad families, essentially orientated around the collection philosophy for dry recyclables. Typically, those operating commingled collections are inclined to run trucks with two or three compartments that compact the payload. These bear a close resemblance to traditional refuse collection vehicles (RCVs), and are employed for similar reasons, i.e. they can carry a larger payload, so reducing the number of journeys to and from a depot, as well as minimising the number of operatives and vehicles needed.

Inevitably, fuel costs are a key factor influencing the design of vehicles, but there are doubts that targeting higher payloads through the compaction of materials is efficient. According to Paul Jones, Performance Director for May Gurney, it is important to take into account the route of a round. “If the truck’s doing lots of rural runs where it’s not collecting so much and it’s just driving then it’s not so bad, but once it’s in an urban area doing first and second gear, efficiency drops horrendously. The multi-compartment compaction vehicles are worse than the standard RCVs. When you have split backs, fuel efficiency can fall below three miles per gallon (mpg).”

Furthermore, he notes, because this type of vehicle is employed for commingled collection, it inevitably has to drop food waste at a separate location to the materials recovery facility (MRF) that dry recyclables are taken. This, he notes, compares unfavourably with the 10-12 mpg fuel consumption of stillage carrying trucks, employed by those opting for source separation of dry recyclables on the round.