A garbage truck, called a rubbish truck in Australia, a bin lorry in the United Kingdom and a trash truck in parts of the United States, is a truck specially built to collect municipal solid waste and carry it to a treatment facility. The first self-propelled garbage trucks were ordered by London's Chiswick District Council in 1897 from Thornycroft, described at the time as steam motor tip-cars for the collection of dust and house refuse. Covered bodies replaced open-topped trucks in the 1920s to control odor and spillage, a cable-lift hopper design appeared in 1929, George Dempster introduced the wheeled-container Dumpster system in 1937, the Garwood Load Packer brought hydraulic compaction that roughly doubled truck capacity in 1938, and Scottsdale, Arizona introduced the first automated side-loading truck in 1969. Garbage trucks remain a fixture of urban infrastructure worldwide, and the shift from manual loading to automated systems has both improved collection efficiency and reduced worker injuries.
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