Once upon a time, there was one truck that came down your street to pick up rubbish. These days, what with green waste, brown waste, dry recyclables, there’s potential for a whole lot more traffic. Cue visions of householders angrily waving their rolled up copies of the Daily Mail.

What’s more, recycling is now, in many places, the biggest game in town, and as we’ve just noted, it’s not a single amorphous entity like residual waste. To gather an increasingly wide range of materials efficiently, in a way that doesn’t clog up the streets, a new breed of trucks has emerged: all hail the one-pass recycling collection vehicle.

The key characteristic is an ability to take food waste alongside dry recyclables in one pass. On this basis many councils now fulfill Defra’s wish to see smelly waste picked up once a week. Exactly how they choose to do this – the basket of materials to opt for, et cetera – can vary tremendously, yet getting the right vehicle design is vital for a successful operation.

“Each build these days tends to be bespoke for the customer, in terms of the splits in the body, the body sizes, the range of options that they choose, even the body design”, notes Sheldon Hall, UK Marketing Manager for vehicle manufacturer Terberg Matec. “Things have moved on. It’s about clients having a better idea about what they want, for instance in the splits of the streams they are collecting and the weights of the streams they are collecting, the density and all the rest of it.”

The result is vehicles that fall into two broad families, essentially orientated around the collection philosophy for dry recyclables. Typically, those operating commingled collections are inclined to run trucks with two or three compartments that compact the payload. These bear a close resemblance to traditional refuse collection vehicles (RCVs), and are employed for similar reasons, i.e. they can carry a larger payload, so reducing the number of journeys to and from a depot, as well as minimising the number of operatives and vehicles needed.

Inevitably, fuel costs are a key factor influencing the design of vehicles, but there are doubts that targeting higher payloads through the compaction of materials is efficient. According to Paul Jones, Performance Director for May Gurney, it is important to take into account the route of a round. “If the truck’s doing lots of rural runs where it’s not collecting so much and it’s just driving then it’s not so bad, but once it’s in an urban area doing first and second gear, efficiency drops horrendously. The multi-compartment compaction vehicles are worse than the standard RCVs. When you have split backs, fuel efficiency can fall below three miles per gallon (mpg).”

Furthermore, he notes, because this type of vehicle is employed for commingled collection, it inevitably has to drop food waste at a separate location to the materials recovery facility (MRF) that dry recyclables are taken. This, he notes, compares unfavourably with the 10-12 mpg fuel consumption of stillage carrying trucks, employed by those opting for source separation of dry recyclables on the round.

Jones believes many councils have taken the wrong perspective: “You still have to cover the same number of miles, whether you are running a truck that does three mpg or 10 mpg. We might have to run more trucks, but they only have to go to one depot. Besides, we are not against creating more jobs if that is offset by the income we get from the higher quality recyclables you get through source separation.”

May Gurney is not the only operator to run source-separation of dry recyclables and food waste collection in one pass. The newest design, of what Paul Jones terms the resource recovery vehicle (RRV), to enter the marketplace has been developed by municipal vehicle specialist Romaquip, based on a design partnership with Bryson Recycling in Northern Ireland.

This latest RRV, known as the Romaquip Kerb-Sort, represents a significant step forward in terms of innovation. At the heart of its design, is an efficient use of space in the upper half of the vehicle body for the collection of cans, plastic and possibly even cartons. Eric Randall, Director for Bryson Recycling, and the man who had the original idea, explains: “Romaquip designed a system to lift the material and then using a push plate to compact it actually to a small degree into the void space above and this means that we can not only get the materials up quickly and safely but we can also get them off very quickly and safely, too.”

The design, notes John McKeown, Romaquip’s Technical Director, places a premium on ensuring there is nodegradation of material quality: “The compaction was quite unique in the fact we did not want to over compact, otherwise you make it difficult to separate the plastic and cans, so we are getting approximately another 50 per cent in terms of volume.”

Familiar with running both commingled and source-separation collection services in Northern Ireland, Eric Randall believes collecting with this configuration makes a lot of sense: “It’s very easy to separate plastics from cans. We also collect rigid mixed plastics and that again is about reducing the amount of time on the road, which is a productivity issue.”

This is not the only departure with the previous generation of source separation RRVs; the Kerb-Sort also dispenses with the approach of loading stillages (the cages of cans, glass, paper offloaded by forklift trucks). Instead, the new approach involves hydraulics to open doors for offloading paper and glass separately in the depot yard. Similarly, the plastics and cans are deposited at the depot through a process of hydraulics. All of this contributes to a major reduction in unloading time at the depot and Randall believes Bryson Recycling might soon achieve an unloading time of less than five minutes per vehicle.

The only material that leaves the vehicle in a detachable container, or ‘pod’, is food waste. This is done automatically and the only manual operation is when the operatives wheel it away for a forklift to load into the food waste container.

All of the hydraulic actions are done using a touchscreen in the vehicle cab, making the operation as straightforward as possible. McKeown considers this an important factor in reducing the risk of accident or injury.

In terms of health and safety, the Kerb-Sort also showcases several other notable improvements on its predecessors. First, the configuration of compartments and a degree of hydraulic loading has made it possible to remove the need for walkways on the vehicle. “We found that a vast majority of our accidents were as a result of people falling off the vehicle or tripping as they were climbing in or out of them”, notes Randall. “So we made the decision that we just will not have anybody climbing onto the vehicle at any point other than into the cab.”

Second, perhaps more significant given a long-standing concern of the Health and Safety Executive, is the innovation to reduce noise exposure in the loading of glass. McKeown describes the new approach: “We’ve achieved that with an automated emptying system that clips onto the holder and doesn’t unload bottles until it completely seals, and that seals in both noise and shards of glass.”

Few would deny that the new generation of one-pass RRVs represents a significant evolution. “Removing garden waste from the equation, there is not much in the municipal waste stream that cannot be taken onboard”, says Randall, listing textiles, batteries, hand tools and small WEEE among the other materials currently collected.

This might not be the total zero-waste solution, but the day appears to be getting closer. According to Randall, the next step will involve innovating with the householder: “We’ve taken a major step forward here with how you collect the material vehicle-wise, and how you subsequently handle it depot-wise and finding the end markers for that. All those things are now doable with the new vehicle. Now there’s the issue of containerisation given the expanded range of materials, and I just don’t think we’ve cracked that nut yet.”