The City of Canning council voted unanimously to purchase five new rubbish trucks in a move that will cost the city over $2 million.
The five new single-operator, side-loading refuse compactor trucks will be brought in to replace existing ones as part of the City’s Fleet Replacement Program.
The new trucks will be used to collect recycling and waste from regular 240 litre residential “wheelie” bins.
Three will be assigned to recycling collection and two to solid waste.
Three truck companies contacted the city after an advertisement was placed in a major newspaper in February this year and Guildford’s Truck Centre WA Pty Ltd was deemed most suitable.
The city also issued a tender for a new 6×4 cab chassis truck to transfer the body of an existing rear-loading rubbish truck body onto.
City of Canning chief executive Arthur Kyron said the new trucks were much more modern than the existing trucks and would increase service efficiency.
The new trucks will have disk brakes instead of drum brakes and anti-skid technology, which the city’s report said would mean they were significantly safer than the models they were replacing.
“Given the start-stop nature of a refuse vehicle’s daily role, these features combined not only to make the new trucks significantly safer, they are a lot cheaper and easier to maintain,” the report said.
They will also include GPS route tracking, fatigue support for driver safety and cameras on the rear.
The report said the features could extend the vehicle’s life by 50 per cent and save money in the long term.
The cost of the six trucks exceeded the allocated budget of $1,968,000 by about $238,000 but the city said the sale of existing trucks would cut that down significantly.
Councillor Lindsay Holland said replacing the trucks was simple maths.
“The trucks are due for replacement anyway,” he said.
“We did some quite good research on which trucks to use and it came out the trucks we’ve chosen are the best ones. They’re fit for our purpose.”
Mr Holland said the trucks being replaced could be sold on to private buyers or to other cities, which were still happy running the older models.
