For the first time in a while I’m bringing fresh footage of the Ku-Ring-Gai trucks in this video! Prior to my recent videoing activities between jobs earlier this year, I hadn’t visited this north shore council of Sydney since late 2009. For quite some time I’d been meaning to get back to KRG for new footage, but that didn’t happen until a few weeks of spare time came around last April. KRG was one of the very first councils I visited for videos when everything started on RU-vid, so it was cool to get back there again and catch more of the machines I saw over 9 years ago. Veolia/Collex has been the KRG collection contractor for some time now and today they still do the job, with it being their last full size residential contract in Sydney. This fleet has been running for a solid 10 years now and will be pushing hard for about another year due to a contract extension, but I’m told the trucks are in good condition for their age. Although the company recently deployed 5 later model one armers for use on garbage, as the previous equipment was quite done with, however the existing rear loaders, recyclers and greenies remain.
On a Friday morning I set out early with plans to hunt down a number of Hornsby trucks and two of the KRG recycle trucks. To my delight, I found one of the recyclers broken down early in the morning, so I pushed the KRG plans to later in the morning with expectations I’d find them working late. After succeeding in Hornsby very quickly, I crossed back into KRG where I would end up spending 5 hours to create this 12min video of two trucks. I first met the paper collector working along a few straight roads in Wahroonga and around midday I caught up with the bottle collector around North Wahroonga. Why did it take me 5 hours to achieve what I wanted? There was a lot of waiting around while the paper truck was getting packed up properly full, they needed to make the lengthy journey to tip the first loads, I found myself driving around in circles trying to find both of them, I also spent a lot of time on foot getting between the two working areas and it took a while to get the right shots. Finally I was done and dusted around 3pm with plenty of footage of each and was happily headed home.
During this video we watch #401 collecting the paper and cardboard and #404 is emptying the bottle bins. Veolia runs five of these Superior Pak side loaders on house recycling, all with these 29m bodies and the previous raised hopper design - which will be near impossible to find elsewhere today. I’m told these bodies are too tall for the area, which is understandable with a lot of the low trees in certain suburbs. Also you will notice recycling isn’t comingled in KRG, being one of the few remaining Sydney councils (and Aussie councils in general) with a streamed recycling service. On top of that, the dual bin system sees a pair of 240Ls used instead of the usual smaller 120-140L sizes utilised in other councils. Originally the Schaeffer bottle bins had maroon lids and the Sulo2 paper bins had yellow lids, but some time ago they were changed to yellow and blue respectively to match Aussie standards. The awesome thing about KRG is that they have a unique collection set-up in place compared to everywhere else in Australia, just too bad the recycling lid colours were changed around. I hope you enjoy the action, starting off with an audible crash of glass!
4 ноя 2016
