Why do companies that pick up the garbage always come so early? I can not be the only person who hates being woken up by garbage trucks banging stuff at 5:30 am. If a company advertised that they pick up at a more reasonable hour, I would change companies in a new york minute. The fact that none do would seem to suggest that there is something about garbage collection that makes the early hour unchangeable.
It depends in part on where along the route you live. I don’t know when they start and stop where I live, but our garbage collection is after 9:00 am
WAG-Garbage trucks are big and bulky, hard to see around and get past when they are stopped. If the pickups are done when there are a lot of cars on the streets, they cause traffic backups. So they do them when the streets are less busy.
Morning garbage pickup also means you can take your garbage out the previous night… the most convenient time for a lot of people… without leaving it out too long for the dogs and the cats to get in it and for the stink to build up. If garbage pickup was later, people would either having to put it out in the early morning, which is inconvenient, or it’d just be all the liklier to be strewn all over the damned place.
Garbage collectors do have other things to do; the garbage has to be hauled back to the dump and deposited. Dumpsters have to be emptied, and that work goes on all day. They have to do some collection early in the morning or there won’t be time in the day to get it all done.
My garbage gets picked up after 11 o’clock. I would say that the most likely reason for the early garbage pick up is to keep from distrupting traffic with big, slow trucks that stop at every house.
This could be different for other companies, I’m sure. However…
During the course of a day, the trucks have to go back and forth from the pickup zone to the dump zone several times a day. It’s time-consuming and (for the length of the trip) unproductive. That being said, each driver has a relatively large route to cover, and if he/she doesn’t have a swamper (or thrower) to grab and dump while he drives, it takes even more time.
Most towns/municipalities have laws as to when the trucks can be out on the road, generally they’ve got to stop collecting by the start of rush-hour, which is usually defined as 3:30 pm. They’re allowed to be on the road during morning rush-hour, or else they’d never get the job done. Of course, it’s still very difficult for the driver to be productive stuck in all that traffic.
Anyways, this all boils down to what the others have said. If you’ve got to get this all picked up by 3:30 pm, you’d better be starting early. Unfortunately, it’s your bad luck that you’re at the start of a route. Of course, if you’re at the end of the route, and the driver had a bad day and had to get off the road before your house was collected, we could always start the “Ask the Guy who used to be an office worker at a garbage company and had to take the company pick-up out to collect the uncollected trash that the lazy-ass drivers missed” thread.
No, I’m not bitter.
My garbage never gets picked up before 2 - 3 in the afternoon, but my house is the only house on the street - no traffic woes. But I still hate my garbage company. They like everyone to have their garbage out - sitting at the curb - by 6 AM, and if I put my garbage out after 6 AM (like I did it at 8AM a couple of times) they won’t come and get it! I figure they must drive by on one of the connecting streets early and if they don’t see my trash sitting out at 6 they don’t even bother coming down my road - even though they never, ever pick it up before 2 PM. So then I have to call them and they pick it up the next day, then they leave a nasty note with ‘Please have your trash at the curb by 6 AM!’ in bold print…arghhh. So since I am not a 6 AM person that means I have to have my trash out the night before.
We’re lucky. Where my wife’s from, they pick up the garbage EVERY DAY. I’m not saying this is a good thing, but they don’t flush their used paper, either, if you know what I mean.
Where I was living in the city a year ago, the garbage pickup was in the afternoon at a random time. There would always be traffic backed up behind the truck, and you had to take stuff out that morning or forget it.
Even worse was the lazy emember of the neighborhood who would put out their trash the night before (or in some cases, anytime they pleased). The result being that trash pickers would poke through the bags , ripping them and sending stuff all around the block. Despite several efforts by the neghborhood members to make these bums stop( fines, tossing the garbage in their lobby), they continued this practice as long as I was there.
Now where I live the trash is picked up at 5:30 in the morning. I can put the trash out the night before and be done with it. I hear the trash truck some mornings but so what? They’ll be out of the way for rush hour. A few whiners complain in the papers, but the majority of folks realize the neccessity of the time and are grateful that there are people actually willing to be awake at 5:30 to pick up their discards, thus the whiners get shot down pretty fast.