Perfecting Collection

In his 16 years in the industry, Shawn Mandel, safety director for Republic Services, says the technological advancements he’s observed have been phenomenal.

“It’s been amazing to watch these onboard computers and sophisticated camera systems come online,” he says. “With that comes a learning curve for the drivers. These folks that are accustomed to very manual, labor-intensive work on a residential truck are now forced to learn a new system, new mechanics, the operations of joysticks, and so forth.”

New technologies are improving automated collection to increasingly address the issues of ergonomics, public safety, and property accident avoidance.

That’s why the arm on the Curotto-Can is in the front of the cab, says Frank Kennedy, sales director for Curotto-Can Inc.

“Operators aren’t required to ‘rubberneck’—look behind or in a mirror—to view the arm,” he says, adding that this mitigates more than 1,000 repeated neck movements and has the potential to reduce Workers’ Comp claims for neck and back strain.

The arm’s design also is intended to address public safety issues, Kennedy says.

“An operator can concentrate his field of view looking forward,” says Kennedy. “A typical automated side-loader accident occurs when the driver is distracted by looking behind or in the mirror. While distracted, cars could pull in front of the truck…or a child could chase a ball across the street.”

Additionally, having a full view of the arm allows drivers to avoid causing damage to property such as parked cars, mailboxes, and lampposts, Kennedy adds.

Curotto-Can has equipped its 2011 models with an improved joystick that is “more robust and ergonomic,” Kennedy says. “This new joystick requires 50% less travel to run a function.”

Training on any automated collection vehicle focuses on learning how to maneuver the arm, understanding the can location, and getting to know the truck’s capabilities.

Republic sets up five-day onsite courses for employees to practice dumping containers and operating the joysticks and other vehicle controls. Training has to be signed off by a driving training manager prior to the employee taking the trucks on a route.

Part of the significant learning curve is on-the-job training, Mandel adds. Some workers do struggle with automation and are put through a retraining program for certification.

These days, the drivers most likely to succeed at doing automated waste collection include those with computer savvy.

“Workers with experience in gaming, such as Xbox and PlayStation, seem to pick up things quicker,” notes Phil Allen, vice president of sales and marketing for New Way. “I don’t know if it is because of the hand-eye coordination required in the games. Having said that, most drivers experienced with refuse trucks can pick up an automated truck’s operation relatively quickly.”

Ken Beaver agrees. Beaver, the director of innovation for Heil Environmental, says he believes those who have good hand-eye coordination are the best candidates for driving automated collection vehicles.

“They’re working a joystick, which is not unlike a video game,” he says. “They get very good quickly because they’re making 1,200 stops a day and within a couple of months, these guys are extremely accurate.

“Even though the work is happening behind them, they can’t really even see the work directly because most of them will look in their mirror and work from their mirror.”

Some drivers have become so proficient with automated collection that they are not even looking at what they’re picking up, Beaver says.

“They’re driving by the can and they know that after so many milliseconds they drift by that can, they can reach and grab the can, empty it, and put it back down,” he says. “I’ve seen cases where drivers are supposed to come to a full stop at a home, but they roll to a stop because they’re that good. They can do it on the fly—empty the can and throw it back from where they picked it up.”

Shawn agrees that while driving residential rear-load waste collection vehicles used to be a “young person’s game,” automated collection vehicles enable a person to run an entire career without having to transition to a frontloader, rolloff or do something else because the truck is doing all the work for them.

Despite one’s experience with computers and irrespective of age, it takes a focused person to drive an automated collection vehicle, says Kevin Watje, chief operating officer of Wayne Engineering.

“This type of person needs to be detail-oriented,” he says. “They can’t be gawking.”

For a driver to be productive on a route that may have in excess of 1,000 homes a day, the question arises: Can the operator stay that focused and careful throughout the entire collection period?

“You’re either out there a long time and you start to get the fatigue factor, or they’re so focused because they’re picking up at such a high rate and you’re getting 120-plus homes an hour that one has to wonder can you go through a seven-hour period like this that focused for that long?” Watje says. “That’s an issue that has been thought about so many times.”

Part of the skill level comes in that driving automated collection vehicles tends to be a premium job, Beaver notes.

“Unlike some of the more labor-intensive jobs, these guys tend to be in these jobs for a long time,” Beaver notes. “They are the premium jobs. It’s much more enjoyable work to sit in a vehicle than to walk behind a rearloader most of the day. So there’s not a lot of turnover in those positions, which helps with their skill level.”

Marc Nadeau, engineering product manager for Labrie Environmental Group, says automated collection requires “less physical aptitude and more dexterity. This opens up the labor market for the fleet managers, because now they are not restricted to individuals with the ability to lift X-Y-Z pounds. Automated collection truly decreases injuries and potential risk, making this work more appealing to more people.”

Finding people willing to drive automated collection vehicles is not difficult, Mandel says.

“We’ve opened up this group of candidates that we had not historically had as an industry before,” he says.

While in the past, those operating the residential rear-load system have historically been predominantly young males, the automated system has resulted in Republic Services hiring an “exponentially larger percentage of females into those roles” as well as drawing from an older workforce.

As a result, the company has had “great success,” which is rooted in the initial five-day training, says Mandel.

Others in the industry are noting an increase in the number of women working as operators of waste collection trucks.

Watje says if he were to pick such a focused person, it would be a woman driver, adding that insurance statistics back that up.

Indeed, according to the website Insurance.com, a 2007 risk analysis study conducted by Carnegie Mellon TrafficSTATS for AAA showed that men have a 77% higher risk of dying in an accident, compared with women. Numerous other reports from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System, the National Household Travel Survey, and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety support that conclusion.

“Women are far more careful drivers,” Watje notes.

Nadeau agrees. He points out that in psychomotor tests measuring gross dexterity, fine dexterity, or both, females typically demonstrate better fine-dexterity control than males. That they are careful and have more dexterity means they can do an exemplary job behind the wheel of an automated collection vehicle, he says.

Still, women may be deselecting themselves for the work, says Watje.

“What comes to their mind is when they see a help-wanted ad for a trash company to haul trash, they’re thinking the traditional rearloader, and they say that’s not for them,” he says.

“If there were a better job description of that—the comfort of a modern cab all day long, automatic transmission, very easy to drive, operating with a joystick—I think there would be a lot more women applicants. I don’t think our industry is focusing on that.”

In the past, women had avoided jobs such as driving waste collection vehicles because of the labor-intensive nature of the job and buying into the historical mindset that most people possess that it is a dirty job, Mandel points out. That’s changing with automation, he adds. Now the industry is attracting people from all walks of life, including everyone from former school bus drivers to workers transitioning from information technology positions.

“They’re getting their CDLs, a little bit of experience, and finding a great fit at Republic Services,” says Mandel.

Kennedy is noting more women coming into the industry because of automated waste collection.

“Manual collection requires the capability of meeting the demands of repeat loading and, therefore, manual systems operators are usually male,” he says. “Automated collection requires little to no lifting, so the scope of potential operators opens widely. In the case of our Curotto-Can Automated Front Loader, we have many female operators running the system now.”

Last year, Republic put together a series of educational videos and materials on the benefits of automated collection systems for municipalities.

“The image of the industry as a whole has changed and that has brought a lot of interest from a classification of people that we normally wouldn’t have seen in past years,” Mandel says.

Beaver is noting more women drivers than ever before. “I think that’s a typical case of a ‘good old boy’ type of industry where some of the barriers are finally breaking down,” he says. “I suspect some of it is driven by economics. More women are in the workforce and I’d like to think there’s some progress in our society toward accepting women in traditional male roles.”

The challenge for women just coming into the market wanting to drive automated collection vehicles is that because these are seniority-driven, cream-of-the-crop positions, “women aren’t necessary going to walk into a company and get hired on the first day to work in an automated sideloader,” Beaver says. “They have to work their way up the food chain like everybody else, which means starting behind a rear loader. It might be some time before they actually get that opportunity.”

Irrespective of gender or other factors, “the job of an automated truck driver now is a decent one,” says Allen. “You’re driving a quarter-million-dollar truck. You have a very ergonomic and comfortable cab to be working in. Compensation is above average.”

With people of different body types taking jobs as waste collection vehicle drivers—including females and those from other countries—it brings up the question of how the cabs are accommodating in terms of visibility and access to controls.

The cabs remain standardized, says Mandel. “You still have got to be able to see over the steering-wheel column and position yourself from the cab to where you can operate it safely, but there have been some great advancements, and we’ve worked very closely with the vehicle manufacturers to design the trucks to ensure we can accommodate this broader group of candidates and employees in those positions. The manufacturers understand the population that is now coming in for these positions and the importance of ensuring that the cab design itself is conducive to the body type and other factors.”

With the right training, anyone can succeed as a driver of an automated collection vehicle, Mandel says.

“It’s nice to have a broader selection of candidates from which to choose,” he says. “We’ve got folks who 10 or 20 years ago would have never thought to come into our industry. It’s a great industry to be in and one in which they can see themselves for years to come, especially in the current economy. It’s been a real benefit to us as an organization and to the industry as a whole.”

The design of automated trucks is geared toward the more average-sized person and has become a matter of consideration as the labor pool seeking the driver’s seat expands, not only to include women but those outside of North America, such as Latin America, who may possess a different body type, which in many cases may be smaller than that of the average North American, notes Allen.

“The design of the chassis cabs makes it somewhat of a disadvantage to be real short,” Allen says. “Visibility might be more difficult for a shorter person and also might pose more of a difficulty for foot pedals.”

Watje says he sees more such drivers behind the wheel of automated collection vehicles, not only from Hispanic backgrounds, but from a variety of immigrant cultures whose members take entry-level jobs in the United States.

In the US, ergonomics discussions tend to focus on “where to put a button on a dash so it’s easy to reach or how to get the arm rest so the person is comfortable,” says Watje.

“But the real ergonomics of a truck is from the dirt to the seat of the driver’s pants,” he adds. “That’s where 95% of all injuries will come from, and that is ignored. In many trucks I’ve seen, the outside steps are set up like the worker is climbing a ladder that sits straight up to get into the truck.”

In contrast, European trucks have a stepping style cab-over engine.

“It’s like stepping into a bus and walking right into it,” notes Watje. “You don’t have to sling your rear into it, like climbing a straight ladder.”

Also noting that there is now a larger variety of drivers in the marketplace, Nadeau points out that Labrie uses a standard chassis, “so there is usually adjustment possible for seat height and steering angle,” he says. “Some chassis will have a dedicated joystick position, but when possible, we will offer a joystick support with height, depth, and elbow-rest pad adjustment.”

Kennedy points out that accommodating various sizes of drivers has been a challenge in the industry for years.

“This usually falls to the chassis manufacturer,” he says. “With automated collection, there is usually a choice between left street side or right-hand curb driving positions.

“There is also an available stand-up right-hand driving (SURHD) position for routes that are carted but where the customer is allowed to place extra or bulky items at the curb for collection.” The SURHD allows operators to easily step out of the cab and to their work, says Kennedy.

“In the case of our product, this is two steps. Our product can work in any of these three applications, so the person responsible for the fleet spec needs to assess the kind of driver and the type of collection they will be doing and fit the cab and chassis model to their needs. In recent years, cab space for larger drivers and visibility for smaller drivers has improved significantly.”

Labrie has addressed the issue through numerous video camera options.

“Thus, the ease of use, increased safety, and visibility of our vehicles—which we are constantly refining to achieve the best for our clients—may aid our clients in increasing the range of individuals who can work in our vehicles and so allow employers to hire from a larger labor pool,” Nadeau says.

He also notes that he’s gotten feedback from the field that the work-at-idle feature and smoothness of the arm has resulted in a reduction in the operators’ strain, increasing the quality and value of the job while decreasing lost labor time.

Beaver notes that changing body types is becoming an increasingly important issue in terms of visibility and control access in the cab.

“Whether it’s women, Hispanics, Asians or whoever, there is an issue with size of the drivers, because we Americans are getting bigger, so there’s this much broader spread of body types and sizes,” he says. “I don’t know what the chassis manufacturers are doing to accommodate this broad range of sizes.”

One issue of concern is the ergonomics associated with the joystick, Beaver says.

“We know from talking with operators on routes that when you’ve got to do something 1,200 times a day, five days a week for weeks and months and years on end, the smallest inconvenience becomes a large irritant because of the repetitive nature of the job,” he says.

“We are looking at ways to make that interface between the automated arm and the operator, make it more intuitive and more user-friendly.”

Two benefits are derived by doing so, he says.

“One will be productivity improvement, and the other one will be potentially a safety improvement as well,” Beaver says. “An uncomfortable ergonomic environment will fatigue the driver. That driver will be prone to mistakes because of the fatigue, and he certainly won’t be as productive either.”

An increasing use of navigation and communications systems is being incorporated into the cockpit environment.

“GPS and tracking software can help with routing and missed-stop verification,” Allen says. “Also, the use of camera systems and DVR recorders to record the day’s route can have benefits.”

With automation has come the increased usage of multiple cameras and LCD monitors inside the cab, says Nadeau.

“The monitor is usually mounted under the roof cab and can be pivoted on its base,” he says. “Sometimes, there is a GPS system installed on the dash to optimize the route, but it is not fully integrated in the chassis like it is for navigation systems in cars.”

Labrie works with clients to ensure that drivers are comfortable and the systems add value to their jobs, Nadeau says.

“We are constantly evolving and providing new tools and increased comfort,” he says. “For example, we try to minimize the physical strain on the operator by placing the monitor screens in a strategic location where they will not have to decrease their attention to their line of sight on the road nor turn too much to see the screen. The camera increases security, and we highly suggest our clients use them to increase awareness and minimize blind spots, which leads to a lower number of accidents when backing up.”

From Curtis Dorwart’s point of view, it’s all about the seats. Seats are “always the most obvious and probably the single most popular item when it comes to adjustability in driving position, which can affect both the plane of visibility and access to controls,” says Dorwart, vocational products marketing manager for Mack Trucks.

“Seats that can move in a minimum of four directions: Up, down, back, and forward are the most common. There are seats available with additional adjustability, but most of the extra motion is aimed at comfort, with little to no impact on visibility or control access.”

Control access and visibility call for a sound base-cab design that is set up in such a way that controls, joysticks, switches, and other devices are placed in practical, functional, and ergonomically friendly locations, says Dorwart.

“Productivity of the driver and the machine is paramount, and the truck must be able to support that with controls placement and the design of windshields, dashboards, and doors so that forward and side visibility is not compromised.”

In addition to the ease of operation, automated collection vehicles offer enhanced safety features.

Not only are operators not having to get in an out of trucks more than 1,000 times a day on some routes, but features such as SmartDrive and DriveSafe are adding more safety value to automation. Drivers remain in the cab for nearly the entire route, and can safety navigate increasingly congested roads.

That leads to a decrease in liability issues. Good training makes the most of the automation.

“Liability and risk is huge,” Mandel points out, “imaging the strength of those trucks and the devastation those arms can potentially do when they are not operated correctly.”

Many of Republic’s senior managers started off as drivers, Mandel says.

“They understand the importance of training and the importance of ensuring that we have consummate professionals behind the wheel and at the controls of those vehicles even more now than in the history of the company simply because of the technological advancements,” he says.

“It truly does take a professional who understands it’s not just a truck,” he adds. “There are consequences when someone takes shortcuts.”

Navigational systems are assuming a more predominant role in the cockpit, says Mandel. Republic is using systems such as FleetMind and Routeware.

“We have had some great success with online routing, utilizing GPS and onboard recording devices from a customer service standpoint as well as from a safety perspective in capturing various events and identifying behaviors that may not be conducive to safe operations,” says Mandel. “We’re able to address those before the accident occurs.”%{[ data-embed-type="image" data-embed-id="5c9c37be02f83ecb6fed21f4" data-embed-element="aside" data-embed-align="right" data-embed-alt="Page Break Line" data-embed-src="https://img.msw