On the road to silent waste collection

Waste collection is a significant noise source in a modern urban environment. To minimize the disturbance to the society, there is an increasing pressure to move the waste collection to the off-peak traffic hours of the day. To achieve this, as silent as possible ways to collect waste are required. A way to accomplish this is to use electrical trucks for waste collection. Simultaneously, the containers and the handling of containers must be made more silent than now. We are currently developing new concepts for electrical trucks, their compaction systems, as well as for the containers and their handling. As the first step, we have evaluated current situation with conventional trucks, containers, and waste collection methods in urban environment, by recording the noise and video of typical waste collection procedures. The most annoying noise comes from the impulsive noise sources, such as waste container transport on uneven surface, as well as from the waste container emptying to the waste collection truck. In addition to the expected lower inherent noise with electrical trucks, we have found out that significant decrease in noise levels and annoyance are possible in the handling of the waste containers.