While Disney/Pixar’s “Toy Story 3″ doesn’t hit theaters until June 18th, it’s reasonable to assume that a garbage truck will play a role in the plot. We can deduce this because, according to The Press Democrat, the studio approached Santa Rosa, Calif.-based North Bay Corp. about recording sounds made by the hauler’s collection vehicles for use in the film. The company obliged, sending four different trucks to Skywalker Sound where they were recorded while performing various tasks and made a MRF available for additional recording. In return, North Bay reportedly requested that Pixar depict the garbage truck in the film swathed in the company’s green and white paint job with red and white reflective tape. Looking at the tie-in merchandising, it would appear that request was fulfilled.

No one who witnessed Archie Lee Wells’ casket rolling slowly toward the graveyard on the forklift of a garbage truck would question the man’s devotion to his profession. A garbage truck driver for 20 years, Wells succumbed to a malignant brain tumor in December at age 43. Before the end, he made it clear that he should be conveyed to his final rest by the Mack truck he drove for Western Waste Services (WWS) in Twin Falls, Idaho.

“That was his final wish,” Wells’ 21-year-old daughter, Melvina Patterson told the Magic Valley Times-News. “My dad told me from the time I was a little girl that he was not a rich man. He didn’t want to be carried in a hearse.

“‘I’m a garbage man and I want to be carried on the forklift of my garbage truck,’” she said he had told her. A procession of WWS vehicles proudly carried out that last request.

Wells leaves behind seven children, 12 grandchildren and a host of garbage men striving to live up to his legacy.

Source: Magic Valley Times-News

A recent piece in the New York Times details New York City’s pursuit of hybrid garbage trucks. The New York Sanitation Department (DSNY) is currently testing four different models provided by Mack and Crane Carrier. The city will take a year to decide which model it likes best, then purchase 300 trucks per year. According to the article, the large purchase could help lower the cost of heavy-duty hybrids.

The article predicts that 4,850 medium- and heavy-duty hybrid trucks will be on the road by next year, compared to 200 in 2006.

Is your firm or municipality considering the purchase of hybrid vehicles in the near future?

In case you hadn’t heard, it snows in Colorado — A LOT. And according to meteorologists, with an El Nino weather pattern in effect, Colorado is due to get even more snow than usual this winter. So how to convey the potential destructive force of all that snow when it accumulates on the roof of an average home? Why, throw a garbage truck up there, of course!

The Do It Yourself Network show “Disaster House” demonstrates the effects of various natural and manmade disasters that might befall a home and, subsequently, what it takes to repair that damage. To simulate how a heavy snowfall can collapse a pitched roof, the show’s producers used a crane to lower a 19-foot rear-loader onto an (presumably unoccupied) Englewood, Colo. home, with predictably spectacular results.

Good luck finding the clause in your homeowner’s policy that covers this particular eventuality.

Source: cbs4denver.com

What ever would we do without our favorite cultural provocateurs, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)? The organization has received a great deal of press for its recent spate of advertisements (and rejected advertisements) that overtly use sex to promote a vegetarian lifestyle. Now, they want to slap that steamy message on a garbage truck. Because, if I’m being honest, the two things that usually spring to mind when I gaze upon a trash-filled rear-loader is 1) “H-O-T!” and 2) “I should really give up meat.”

According to the Topeka Capital-Journal, the group petitioned Topeka, Kan. Mayor Bill Bunten with a $6,000 offer to adorn one of the city’s recycling collection trucks with an image of a pert blonde in a lettuce-leaf bikini and the admonition “Vegetarians Do It to Save the Planet!” The move came after the city accepted $3,000 from KFC to fill potholes in the city’s roads and topped them with advertisements for the fast food establishment. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bunten declined PETA’s offer.

Although fuel prices declined during last fall and winter, they have been inching back upwards lately. Generally speaking, that trend can be expected to continue in the coming years.

That was a point driven home by Jamey Holland, a risk management consultant for Kansas City, Mo.-based FCStone Trading, during Tuesday’s “Take Charge of Fuel Prices: Effective Risk Management” conference session.

To illustrate his point, Holland cited studies predicting that global energy demand will increase by 44 percent over the next 20 years and that global oil demand will rise to 107 million barrels per day over the next two decades. Global demand is currently around 84 million barrels a day, he said.

Holland also noted that one study projects 2 billion cars to be on the road worldwide in 2030, up from 812 million automobiles just seven years ago.

Toss in the fact that the number of refineries in the United States is declining, and you have a climate ripe for soaring and volatile fuel prices, Holland said.

So, what’s a fleet to do? Hedge, Holland said.

For one thing, fleets should consider buying call options, which function very much like insurance policies, Holland said. “It’s like a policy against higher fuel prices,” he said.

The fleet pays a premium, and if fuel prices rise above a pre-determined level, the increase is covered by the call option. If prices decline, then the fleet purchases gas for a lower price, and there is no claim on the policy, Holland explained.

Other hedging options include purchasing heating oil futures or swaps, Holland added, with the hope that gains in those investments will help offset increased diesel fuel expenditures.

In today’s troubled economy, companies are holding onto equipment longer and delaying the purchase of new devices. However, keeping equipment too long is an almost surefire to spend too much money, Dave Dawson, CEO of Houston-based AssetNation, told attendees of a WasteExpo conference session on Monday.

Dawson’s remarks came during the “Leveraging End-of-Life Assets to Improve Cash Flow in a Struggling Economy” session. His company has sold more than $1 billion in assets on behalf of Fortune 1000 companies.

Noting the intention of some waste haulers to drive their trucks “until the wheels fall off,” Dawson said such an ownership strategy can be financially harmful as maintenance costs soar and the re-sale value of the equipment plummets.

“There is really a better way to manage the end-of-life asset,” Dawson said. “At some point, it costs more to maintain than the monthly cost of new equipment.”

Larger fleets often go about answering the question “When is it time to trade out my equipment?” in a “very programmatic way,” Dawson added.

These larger companies keep an eagle eye on life cycle costs - carefully keeping track of acquisition costs, maintenance expenses, the costs of idle equipment, risk-management expenses and disposal/exit costs - to best calculate the right time to get rid of a piece of equipment.

For an asset management program that seeks to get rid of equipment at the right time to be successful, the following dynamics need to be in place, according to Dawson:

* The program must be a strategic priority.

* The program must have an executive sponsor.

* It needs to be rolled out uniformly across a company.

* It requires ongoing management and reinforcement.

* The program must have the ability to measure progress toward financial goals.

* And, it requires frequent communication across multiple levels of a company.

However, even if you do drive your truck “until the wheels fall off,” you will still likely find a buyer of some sort, Dawson added.

Chicago sanitation workers are up in arms about the city’s possible purchase of up to 200 automated, side-loading collection trucks. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, the move would likely lead to substantial lay-offs, as trucks currently run with three-man crews (one driver and two collection workers). The automated trucks require only a driver operating a cart-lifting arm from the cab. Chicago Streets and Sanitation officials say the trucks would give them more flexibility in operations.

Union leaders say automation would not only be bad for collection workers, but also represent a “drastic” reduction in services for Chicagoans. Automated trucks only collect trash in cans, whereas currently, loose trash and bulky items are collected by hand. Moreover, questions have been raised about the trucks’ performance in trials around the city. For its part, the city says the purchase is far from a done deal (it recently put out a “request-for-quotations,” but expects to spend around $40 million) and that it currently has no plans to cut its labor force.

The economic gloom-and-doom continued yesterday when Daimler AG announced that it will discontinue its Sterling Trucks line next March. Daimler will close two plants that produce Sterling trucks — one in Portland, Ore., and one in St. Thomas, Ontario, Canada — resulting in the loss of approximately 3,500 jobs, according to media reports.

“This is an indication of how bad things are,” Michael Tyndall, an analyst at Nomura Securities in London told Bloomberg News. “It’s positive for the long term, but everyone’s focused on the short term.”

Daimler’s press release announcing the move can be read by clicking here.

And here are a handful of news stories on the move:

• The aforementioned Bloomberg article.

• An article by Forbes.com.

• One from The New York Times.

• And, finally, the Wall Street Journal’s take.

Several years ago, former Vice-President Al Gore appeared on Saturday Night Live and, in a skit based on the premise that he won the 2000 election and was addressing the nation from the Oval Office, said that he had mandated that cars run on trash. The joke got a big laugh from the studio audience, surely in part because the idea seemed a little wacky.

Well, wacky may be getting closer to reality than we could have imagined then.

According to this report from a Northwestern Medill School of Journalism newspaper, Lake County, Ind., may soon be home to the “first commercial-scale plants in the country [that] turn garbage into ethanol.”

Indiana Ethanol Power LLC has submitted a proposal to the county’s Solid Waste Management District for a facility that would use a process called “weak-acid hydrolysis” to convert trash into roughly 20 million gallons of ethanol a year, the paper says. Meanwhile, Genahol-Powers 1 LLC is seeking the county’s permission to build a facility that would burn trash to produce approximately 30 million gallons of ethanol annually.

If the district approves the proposals at a June meeting, then the plants could conceivably be up and running within two years, according to the paper. However, the local Sierra Club is voicing concerns about the technology that would be used in the Genahol plant.

“It’s still kind of an old-fashioned technology,” Sandy O’Brien, chair of the Dunelands Sierra Club, told the newspaper. “They’ll be burning things they could be recycling, like plastic.”

The Lake County news comes nearly a month after Waste Management announced that it has partnered with Linde North America to develop a Northern California facility that will convert landfill gas into liquified natural gas (LNG) to fuel area collection trucks. The facility is slated to open next year and Waste Management says it will produce roughly 13,000 gallons of LNG a day.

So, what’s your take? Will this prove to be a viable end use for trash?