Right on the western fringes of greater Sydney is Penrith, undoubtedly one of the biggest councils part of the metropolitan area, encompassing large urban clusters and plenty of rural outskirts, whilst continuing to grow with urban sprawl. Penrith is a location that hasn’t been featured in my videos for quite some time, already coming up to 9 years since I last did an upload from the place! I originally caught up with the trucks across there in October 2008, finding two young side loaders on garbage and recycling a year into the contract. Fast forward about 10 years and you’ll find a decent chunk of the original fleet still in service, plus a handful of brand new machines purchased in recent times, then there are various used trucks sourced from other locations. Visy Recycling is currently contracted to collect recycling, Remondis provides litter bin and liquid waste services, with Suez (formerly SITA) handling the majority portion of garbage, organics and clean-up. However, at the present time a new, massive and comprehensive collection contract is in the pipeline for one of the major waste companies out there.
When the contract first kicked off in October 2007, houses were provided with a pair of 240L bins, one being for mixed general household and garden waste, and the second for commingled recycling. In August 2009, the council introduced a third bin to residents to separately recover organic waste - but not limited to garden materials, even including food waste. This was the first service of its kind to be launched in Sydney, let alone one of the first in the state and whole country! As a result of this system, the red lid residual waste bin became a fortnightly service, the green lid organics took over the weekly frequency and yellow lid commingled recycling maintained the existing fortnightly schedule. So one week organics and recycling bins go out for collection, the next week organics and residual are presented. It’s been quite a controversial system everywhere it has been initiated, but mainly due to a whole lot of ignorance and misunderstanding! I’ve always thought that households who whinge about the unorthodox system simply need to overhaul their waste disposal habits and understand the whole concept better.
In March 2016 I made an overdue visit to the Penrith region midmorning on a Wednesday, searching the areas of Cranebrook, Jordan Springs, Werrington, etc to find some local domestic trucks. After having a string of unsatisfactory sightings, I eventually settled on the suburb of Werrington Downs, and finally after 2 hours of impatiently stuffing around and getting absolutely nothing, two trucks rocked up. Both feature in this video, being #53 and #57, part of the original group of 10 x Superior Pak Raptors on 2007 Iveco ACCOs initially used for weekly 240L garbage. Once the organics service commenced, some of these trucks started emptying green lidded bins, others continued with general waste, all getting stickered with respective coloured signage - we see one of each! These days the trucks are pretty battered up and looking worse for wear, just hanging in there until the end of the contract in mid 2019. How about the condition of the signage on the nearside of both units, still curious to know how it got so rough/tacky! Hopefully before everything wraps up I’ll get more of the Penrith collections and certain other equipment. Sorry about the clip around the 12:00 mark, it ended prematurely due to a regrettable dead battery, still felt right to include. Also thanks to both operators for letting me video!
5 апр 2018
