How do you wash a garbage truck or a refuse truck? Well this job is pretty tough considering garbage trucks are built in such a way that they have all these little boxes and holes where you are going to end up spraying. The water is going to come back in all different angles and soak you. So any dirt on a garbage truck is going to be on you when you are done. They are really hard to soap because you have to soap each individual square on the side of the entire garbage truck. You need to charge at least twenty dollars minimum to wash a garbage truck.

Chances are, they have a ton of them so twenty times a lot of trucks is a lot of money. If you are working for BFI, GreenTeam or a local municipality they"ll have upwards of forty plus trucks. It is not going to be easy work but it is going to be good money. These trucks have hydraulics in the front where all the hydraulic lifts are and it can be a fire hazard if you do not clean all of that grease. The mechanics usually over grease the hydraulic fittings. The drivers try to compact as much as they can into these trash trucks so they can do fewer trips to the dump. Each time they go to the dump it costs the company or city money.

Image is surprising with the trash companies. Considering that they are hauling trash they still want to have such a good image and such clean vehicles. Kind of sounds crazy, but that is what they are looking for. They are looking for that good image just like Federal Express wants all of their vehicles to look clean. You are going to have to hand soap the handles on a garbage truck. You are not going to be able to use brushes in between those little squares and in between all the handles. You are going to have to hand soaped those parts. I do not know another way to do it unless you use a lot of chemical and acid bleach them.

If you have done them good one week you can probably come by the next week and use the hot water pressure washer on them. You better wear a rain suit if you do not want to get wet, because you are going to get soaked doing trash trucks. Turco, Bio-Kleen, and Simonize makes some really good products. If you have a reclamation area or a triple trap clarify that you are able to work with in the trash yard you may want to use Turco products. You can spray them on with the Hudson pump up sprayer and then come back with high pressure, hot water and pretty much clean them without the hand soaping. The first time you do them you are obviously going to have that ground in stuff and you are going to have to hand soap the entire trash truck. It is going to take a lot of time and a lot of work. You are not going to make any money. You are going to spend it all on labor, if you do not have a good crew with you. A poorly run crew is going to eat up all your labor and never get the job done.

What about city yards? Cities sometimes own trash trucks that they use for refuse collection. Sometimes they will have their own recycling trucks. You will need to bid on a yearly contract with the purchasing office. Most city contracts are from June to June because that’s their fiscal year. Most cities will contract with BFI, Waste Management or one of those other large trash companies to do their city hauling. BFI and Waste Management will also have other trash contracts to pick up from city and county buildings with government agencies.

Some counties and cities will wash their own trash trucks because they may own the municipal yard that has the dump. A county may also have recycling trucks that they own as part of a recycling program. So there are government contracts cleaning trash trucks. If you have the government contract for cleaning the trash trucks you can probably get the contract for cleaning the larger trash company trucks nearby.

Sanitation Pump Trucks

How do you clean sanitation pump trucks? They are similar to garbage trucks. There are EPA laws covering trucks that pump out clarifiers and pick up all of the sludge from car washes and septic tanks. They have to be cleaned before they go back onto the highway after dumping their hazardous load. So how do you clean them? You clean them with high pressure hot water and you have to make sure that the waste water goes into some kind of clarifier or collection area. What you are washing off the vehicle had to be hauled away in the first place.

Generally what is on the vehicle is more of the same hazardous stuff that they carry away inside their tanks. Maybe not considered hazardous to you or I, but it would be considered Class II hazardous waste. You have to soap them and rinse. You wouldn’t necessarily want to dry a sewer truck. Maybe just dry the mirrors, the windows and the cab, clean the rims real well and dry them out because you don’t want the water resting stagnant in them. Other then that I would not say to worry about drying them.

"Lance Winslow" - Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; www.WorldThinkTank.net/wttbbs/