With the growing talk about the electric vehicle revolution, the Palmy City Council has quietly been running two fully electric EV rubbish trucks for the past 5 years, since August 2018. One truck is dedicated to glass collection while the other is a multipurpose rear load vehicle.
Although they have been on our streets for over 5 years, this is the first time I have documented and wanted to incorporate some inner-city waste collection our council offers businesses.
This video features the nifty glass collection truck collecting glass creates placed out by different businesses around the city. The truck is equipped with an onboard sorting platform where the driver sorts the different types of glass by their colour and place them into their specific compartments.
Once the onboard sorting compartments are full, they are lifted up and tipped into the three hoppers on the truck. Brown, green and clear glass are kept separate which allows the council to sell this recycled glass at a higher price due to the minimal cross contamination.
These electric trucks were constructed in New Zealand by Manco Environmental Ltd and are registered as "2018 Factory Built Sea Electric".
The two fully electric trucks will prevent 30 tons of carbon being released into our atmosphere each year. That is equivalent to 8 cars being taken off the road.
The two 100% electric trucks cost a total of NZ$736,000. Nearly half the funding for the two trucks came from the Government through the EECA (Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority).
On a single charge, these electric trucks can travel around 160 to 180 kilometres. Despite this potential range, on average they travel about 40km* per day and take about 7 hours to fully recharge.
(* 40km per day is averaged over 7 days a week from the online milage data about this vehicle. As this truck probably only operates 5 days a week it is more like an average of 56km/day.)
The glass truck can hold a 1900kg payload. Only clean glass jars and bottles are collected. Heat treated glass, broken glass and other types of glass like windows or mirrors cannot be taken. Glass with lids attached or stuck inside bottles is also not acceptable for collection.
When not collecting glass within the City Centre, this truck can be seen servicing small and narrow residential streets. The compact size helps get to places larger trucks cannot.
In 2018 a news article wrote: "The city council has bought two trucks for rubbish and recycling collection, marking the start of the council's plan to convert its entire vehicle fleet to electric" ... but to date, there are still only two fully electric rubbish trucks in the council's fleet. Two new small diesel multipurpose rear load rubbish trucks were added to the council fleet in late 2023.
This video has been filmed over two different months, October 2023 and March 2024. Sadly this vehicle does not always do the inner city run which occurs once a week so there have been a few disappointing days over the past 5 months while I attempted to get footage for this video.
A big thank you to the wonderful driver who took the time to talk with me about the truck. I wasn't expecting this so sorry for my dumb and limited questions on the day; I've thought of heaps of better ones since which could have helped make this video more informative.
Sources of information:
* www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-ze...
* www.stuff.co.nz/manawatu-stan...
* evsandbeyond.co.nz/palmerston...
#electricrevolution #electricvehicle #electrictruck #ev #batterytech #greenrevolution #environmentfriendly #environment #newzealand @PNCCTV
15 мар 2024
