Smash My Trash truck

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I was next to one of these today. The truck has a large, boom mounted, hydraulically driven, multi toothed roller that drives up to your loaded roll-off dumpster and beats the crap out of the trash to compact it. They are franchising it across the US and I guess one is in Cleveland now.

You save money because each dumpster is a fixed price to deliver and haul off no matter what it weighs. Apparently the cost of using Smash My Trash is low enough so you have a savings. From what I can find it costs $300 to smash your trash vs $450 to haul it off so the savings are going to depend heavily on how much it really compacts your trash.

When we used roll-offs we always had a guy carefully stacking waste lumber, etc to maximize the dumpster fill. I yelled at anyone dumb enough to place lumber crossways and create a void. The videeo of the Smash my Trash shows a bunch of pallets tossed in willy-nilly - far and away the worst case.

2

When I was a truck driver I used to go to several places that had these crushers. Big DIY supermarkets found them invaluable as the skips would be rapidly filled with crappy old pallets and unflattened cardboard boxes.

The other side of the coin was the people (often DIY house renovators) who would pack as much as they could into a skip. Using old doors to build up the height and carefully stacking concrete blocks and slabs that could make them so heavy the truck couldn’t lift them.