Great looking scene. Here in the West I have not seen manually loaded trash pickup in at least 25 years. I was amazed when visiting MI, where I grew up, a few years back that the trash service is still done by guys riding on trucks who jump off and manually dump the trash into the truck out of regular trash cans instead of using trash bins that are picked up with hydraulic arms and dumped into the truck. Is there some sort of Union (pronounced "mob") thing preventing trash service from modernizing in the East and having 1 or 2 guys picking up trash 4x as fast as it takes 3-4 guys east of the Mississippi?
Here in NYC the garbage guys wear both kelly green and day glow green with Scotchbright stripes. I think part of the reason we still have manual loading trucks is that the automated trash bin size is ridiculously huge. Buildings in the city here just don' t have the room to store these bins. Many buildings are old and this is the way it has always been done. There are both city sanitation and private trash carting for big newer private buildings. Trash and separated recycling that makes it to the street is all in bags and picked up twice a week.
Many East coast suburbs often have the big automated bin loaders but those areas have more space to store these huge bins as well as less frequent pickups in part because the trash can be stored in the bin.
A large portion of the trash is taken out of New York city by barge and alot is taken by train. The subway has it's own trash trains that go out every night, late nights when the subways switch to local service. It is a blessing and curse to see the trash trains because while they are older and unusual cars to look at, it means you will be that much later getting home.
