A guiding light on safety

Safety is one of those areas where thoughts of competition fall aside, and waste and recycling industry members work together to improve their collective lot.

As technology evolves, equipment standards and safety practices evolve as well, and waste collection trucks are no exception.

John Smith, director of research and validation at Chattanooga, Tennessee-based Heil Environmental, says technological evolution certainly will affect updates to the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) Z245.1: Mobile Wastes and Recyclable Materials Collection, Transportation and Compaction Equipment.

“A few years ago, everybody was saying they wanted autonomous garbage trucks, and still, of course, the topic of autonomy in general comes up.

“When we were talking about autonomy, we agreed to talk about the SAE [Society of Automotive Engineers International] levels of autonomy, which describe autonomy from level one, which is very rudimentary and doesn’t have a lot of automatic features— maybe a few automatic features but not autonomous features—all the way up through level 5, where it’s fully autonomous with no human interaction,” Smith says.

Shifting discussions

However, technology has proven to be a barrier to autonomous collection trucks, so the discussion has shifted. Smith, who chairs the ANSI Z245.1 Subcommittee on Mobile Refuse Collection and Transportation Equipment, says the rise of electric vehicles (EVs) instead might shape the next round of ANSI standards for collection trucks. The last time the Z245.1 standard was updated was 2017.

“There wasn’t an option for electric chassis or electric bodies, so there was no real reason to write them into the standard. So, the standard currently reflects things like CNG [compressed natural gas] and diesel,” Smith says.

He adds that maintaining EVs is very different from maintaining internal combustion engines and likely will be a topic of conversation among the ANSI Z245.1 subcommittee members.

“We’re talking about hundreds of volts and high power density because they have to go all day long. If you were working on a truck from the 2000s or the ’90s, you’d be talking about touching potentially 12 volts or maybe 24 volts, but now you’re talking about high current—hundreds of volts—and it comes from a large set of batteries with battery management system controls on it.”

He says the power quick-disconnect procedure used in the past to cut power from the batteries to the chassis and body is not the same in an EV.

Technicians will need to learn to disconnect the power from the batteries to the cab and chassis or the body of the truck. They’ll also need to learn what personal protective equipment (PPE) to use.

Smith says each company will need to develop its own rules and procedures to enforce proper PPE use.

When a topic such as this comes up, Smith says it spawns a series of conversations beyond the correct, safest way to depower an EV. The questions of whether the procedure needs to be explicitly stated in the standards, whether it should cross reference a separate standard and even what to call the procedure are conversations the subcommittee likely will have.

While maintenance workers’ jobs will change significantly with EVs, Smith says operators likely will not be as affected by the transition.

Jerry Peters, Z245 full committee and a member of the Z245.1 sub-committee and the corporate OSHA compliance manager for Cincinnati-based Rumpke Waste and Recycling, says the standard is voluntary, but it carries a great deal of weight and influence. Over time, he says standards originating in ANSI become part of the industry’s safety culture.

“A lot of people think, ‘OK, where does the two-tenths of a mile, not more than 10 mph and never while backing with the helper riding the riding steps rule come from? Is that an OSHA standard? Is it a [Department of Transportation] standard?’ And the answer is, ‘No.’ It’s actually right in ANSI Z245.1,” he says.

In addition to the EV issues, Peters says some of the safety standards that could be discussed are lighting packages, cart design and how carts interact with cart tippers.

“If there’s one thing to come out of the ANSI standards and the meetings, it’s the camaraderie and the ability to work together.” – Jerry Peters, vice chair, ANSI Standards Z245.1 subcommittee

Getting standards updated

Peters says the ANSI Z245 Committee is the body that ultimately votes on the standards compiled by the Z245.1 Subcommittee on Mobile Refuse Collection and Transportation Equipment.

The subcommittee on which Peters and Smith serve is one of eight waste and recycling ANSI standards subcommittees.

The topics covered by the others are stationary compactors, waste container safety, facility safety, baling equipment, waste container compatibility dimensions, size-reduction equipment and landfill operations safety requirements.

“Those subcommittees are the ones that actually put the standards together, revise the standards and then submit them to the full committee for the next phase,” Peters explains. “As far as I know, Rumpke is the only waste company that actually sits on all the ANSI subcommittees. If you want to have a say in what things look like, you’ve got to be there.”

Once the subcommittees submit their proposed standards to the ANSI Z245 committee, Peters says the full committee votes to open a public comment period. Interested parties can submit comments through www.ansi.org or by emailing standards@wasterecycling.org.

Every five years, Peters says, ANSI recommends revisions to the standards. The maximum time between revisions is 10 years.

“When I say ‘revise,’ it could just be word changes, adding or removing them,” he says.

The Z245.1 subcommittee’s next revision is still a couple of years off, he says, adding that several other committees are set to receive votes first.

Making sausage

The legislative process often is compared to making sausage. When it works correctly, input from various constituencies results in a well-balanced, effective law. The process is similar with ANSI standards.

Smith describes the ANSI subcommittee as a “three-legged stool,” including manufacturers, haulers and suppliers with slightly different relationships to the standards.

He says each group views the standards from a different perspective and brings that to the committee.

He described a hypothetical conversation regarding backup cameras on trucks and how that conversation might proceed and the issues that could arise.

If someone proposes including in the standard that backup cameras should be on all trucks, Smith says some haulers might not want to take a truck out of service just because a camera malfunctions.

“We may have people who say, ‘I cannot down a truck because the camera doesn’t work when yesterday I didn’t even have to have a camera on the truck,’” he says.

Members who have extensive knowledge of the industry can foresee the challenges to proposals that Smith says appear to be “benign” on the surface, and each group looks at each proposal through a slightly different lens, which brings a great deal of nuance to the discussions.

Peters says those types of in-depth conversations ultimately build relationships among committee members.

“If there’s one thing to come out of the ANSI standards and the meetings, it’s the camaraderie and the ability to work together,” he says.

The author is managing editor of Waste Today and can be reached at bgaetjens@gie.net