(Updated 1/11/2026) In the not-so-distant past, all types of household waste were simply thrown into the gaping mouth of a garbage truck by two fit & healthy guys, riding on the truck’s rear steps. The only exceptions were paper and cardboard, everything else went straight to a landfill site.
Two classic, non-selective waste collectors are on display in the DAF Museum, both of them date back to the sixties. Are you ready for a load of rubbish?
Starting in 1964 with this DAF G 1300 and a Geesink roltrommel (rolling drum). The DAF is powered by the truck maker’s DA 475 engine, that’s a naturally aspirated, 4.77 liter inline-6 diesel engine. Maximum power output 100 SAE-hp.
On the drum’s sides it says Do not throw garbage on the street.
The Geesink body can contain up to 17 m³ (600 ft³) of garbage, which roughly weighs 6 metric tons (13,000 lbs).
DAF’s G-chassis was introduced in 1952. For better maneuverability and a tighter turning radius, it had a set-back front axle. Set back substantially, I must add, resulting in more front overhang than on a usual Euro-cabover.
The cab was developed in cooperation with Van Dijk’s Carrosseriefabriek, the company also built these cabs. The compartment with the big doors and roll-down shutters was filled with larger items, left on the curb.
This is why it was called a rolling drum; compacting garbage by gravity, thus making room for more load while the truck was on the job. For unloading, the drum’s back part -pivoting at the top- opened and the garbage was dumped. According to Geesink’s website, their rolling drum was introduced in the late thirties.
The standard, zinc garbage bins as used throughout the country back then.
The bins were hung on a bracket, after which they could be easily tipped for emptying.
Parked next to the G 1300 was this 1968 DAF A 1900 with a much bigger and more modern Faun body. The 1900 was the heaviest of the venerable “Frog-DAF” series. Many of them are still around, owned and driven by classic DAF truck collectors and enthusiasts.
The truck is rated at a maximum gross weight of 15,200 kg (33,510 lbs). Its power unit is a 120 SAE-hp, DD 575 diesel engine. An inline-6, naturally aspirated, with a displacement of 5.76 liter.
At the landfill site, the garbage was pressed out of the cargo area. This fully restored garbage truck was owned by the Van Gansewinkel company.
The zinc bins era ended around 1970. Henceforward, all household waste was put in plastic bags, tied up with any piece of rope. The fit & healthy guys grabbed as many bags as they could and slang them into the truck in one fluid motion.
This really looks like a black hole…
…which it is, in a way. Throw something in and you’ll never see it again.
The Faun equipment was powered by this PTO at the front.
Fast forward to 2020. Selective waste collection has been the norm for quite some time now. And meanwhile, full-EV garbage trucks have also arrived. Like this recently introduced DAF CF Electric 6×2 with VDL E-Power. Electric trucks and tractor units for city work will become the new norm, let there be no doubt about that.
Related article:
Museum Classics: DAF Museum Eindhoven – The Trucks
What was the purpose of the compartment at the back of the cab of the 1964, if not for selective waste pickup?
Loading it with anything that didn’t fit in the zinc bins yet was dumped in a landfill just as well. I’m thinking of the large “one-piece” items like furniture.
I like that electric truck at the end – I wouldn’t mind seeing those on the street here in Toronto. No smoke and a lot less noise.
Back in the late fifties/early sixties, when I was growing up in small town Kentucky, it was expected that every household would burn their waste and then the town’s garbage trucks would pick up the ashes. The older, more settled areas of town, tended to have alleys behind the houses so that at least the barrels were out of sight. In the newer, post WWII development where we lived there were no alleys so each house had a rusty barrel at the curb.
As it happened my father worked for a chemical processing company that had hundreds, if not thousands, of empty barrels that employees could take at will. Anytime someone on our block needed a new barrel my father would grab one from the stack and bring it home. The downside was that these barrels had once contained who knows what kind of chemicals; compounds that I later heard described as “methyl ethyl bad stuff”. The barrels were not cleaned out or anything so the first few times they were lit off unknown carcinogens were released into the atmosphere. Life was much simpler then, and not necessarily in a good way.
Burning and/or burying, indeed, that was the usual way of getting rid of stuff in the more rural areas.
Where I grew up in Sydney Australia, Randwick Council collected the rubbish in the back of open tray Bedford J series trucks. One ‘garbo’ (garbage collector, garbologist) would throw it into the open tray, and there’d often be one (in wellington boots) stomping around in the back of the truck with all the garbage. It was that way at least until the late 60s, maybe into the 70s too.
These trucks show a very different approach to packing the load than the Garwaood or Leach hydraulic ram designs found in North America. While smaller versions are still around for rural routes most residential work is done by side lift trucks that pick up and dump the wheelie bins at the front and dump out the rear at the transfer station. Large dumpsters for commercial use are also typically picked up by a forklift attachment that allows one man operation unlike the old practice of hooking the dumpster to a rear wnd packer and using a winch to tilt the dumpster into the truck.
Question. Anyone know the name of that cool building behind the truck in the last picture? It is beyond awesome and I would like finding out more.
It’s hard to tell, but I believe that is Santiago Calitrava’s El Museu de les Ciències Príncipe Felipe at the Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències in Valencia, Spain.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Arts_and_Sciences
BEO
I believe that’s the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, Spain.
A few years ago, our town which runs its own “resource recovery” (aka garbage) services, collection and landfill, added a few new hydraulic hybrid trucks. They are supposed to be quieter but sometimes during the power cycle they can be very loud … and our first pickup is around 5:30 AM. They use a two sided collection body, and pick up trash and green waste in one run, then come back and pick up the single stream recyclables (glass, plastic, paper) a few hours later. I miss the old days, even through about the year 2000, when the trash collectors rode on the back of the truck with huge wheels bins and ran down driveways to pick up trash right at the house, even behind closed gates if asked to do so. Probably not a fun job, but some of those guys were amazingly fit and would jog down the street with loaded bins, picking up at several houses before emptying their bins, while the truck crawled along the street.
One of the earliest Matchbox models I can remember was similar to the featured truck, they must have used the same system in England.
Indeed. The increasing size of the Matchbox Refuse vehicles reflects the rising scale of household waste and how to deal with it from the late ’50s to late ’70s quite neatly.
My oldest/first Matchbox is the “Refuse Collector No. 15”. Just like your photo, and in Johannes’ original post. I’m not precisely sure what attracted me to this particular model sometime in 1966 or so, but it may have been the “Cleansing Service” text on the body of the truck. I still love that term, “Cleansing Service”.
I also have the two larger models in Bernard’s photo. I guess I’ve always had a thing for garbage trucks.
I bought the latest Matchbox garbage truck last year, Matchbox trucks aren’t what they used to be, mostly plastic and no moving parts, lots of impressive plastic detailing, and its a good looking truck, but not even close to the Ford D series with its realistic mechanical operation in Bernard’s photo.
What are the skid-ski looking things under the chassis? Surely not for the garbos to stand on, as there’s no handholds.
I’d say it’s a combination of an underride (or underwalk) guard and a “skid-ski plate”, protecting the exhaust, diesel tank and such.
Hanging off the back of a garbage truck isn’t so safe and injuries are a concern. Our residential local hauler, Freehold Cartage, converted to a hydraulic system that lifts and tilts small curbside bins into front mounted 10 yard dumpster. Once full, it’s flipped in to the chassis mounted box out back. Works well until someone fills their bin with five hundred pounds of tear off asphalt shingles. I overloaded the system and upset the driver. I had to dump it all out, load it into my loaner minivan and bring to the transfer station myself, again unloading by hand in the rain. Lesson learned!
Many older trucks and roll-off containers are leakers. Those in the profession call it “the juice”. Yuck.
In my days working in truck sales, whenever a garbage truck came in for service, it was serviced before any other trucks and gotten out of the repair bays. The stench was dreadful even in a fifteen-bay shop. Great essay, Johannes!
The kings of stench must be the carcass haulers.
I was one of those “fit and healthy” guys in the late summer of 1972. Our lorry was a late ’60’s Bedford KM with two ragged teddy bears tied to the front bumper and a big screw thing in the back that pulled the rubbish forward in to the bowels of the beast. The interior was a 6 man crew cab but you could hardly move in it because the other guys on the crew hoarded metal to sell for scrap – “non ferocious’ metal was what one of the lads called it
My fellow binmen , if they were “caught short” on the job, would leap into the back of the thing , pull down the big door, and emerge much relieved a few minutes later. God knows it didn’t make it smell any worse!
THose metal bins were really hard on the shoulder , especially if somebody had filled it with stones from their garden or ashes from a coal fire. Sometimes the bin was still hot from the ashes.
Took the job because there was damn all else available andit made me a bit depressed in the end though because being a bin man was like the Myth of Sysiphus who was condemned eternally to roll a stone to the top of a hill only for it to roll back down again . Each week we’d got to the same houses , I’d take out the bin and empty it nicely yet the very next week we’d go back and the foul inmates of the house had ruined it’s pristine emptiness by filling it with rubbish again. I began to take it personally – as you can probably tell..
Anyway I got fired after 4 weeks for telling someone who’d left most of a privet hedge beside the bin that I wasn’t her f*****g gardener, I was the binman !
I really enjoyed your comment, I’ve never been a garbo, as they were known in Australia, but I’ve done plenty of jobs which made me feel exactly as you described in your 4th paragraph.
I was a binman one summer. Lifting the bins was basically a weightlifting course, the only year I had a beach bod. The downside of the old metal bins was that the seams would break and when you lifted the bin on your shoulder, bin juice would cascade all over you. Nice. Being Belfast the crew were a mix of ex-cons, former terrorists and those in between jobs. The real character was the foreman who was a professional gambler who genuinely made money from betting so much so that he often forgot to cash in his pay checks. It’s a better, cleaner job nowadays .
The truth is that much of what is claimed is being recycled ends up in landfills. If the market isn’t there, or if the market is saturated it just gets buried. No one stores it, there is no room to store it. Recycling metals and glass make sense, recycling plastics doesn’t. We would do much better for the environment if we followed Denmark and built high temperature incinerators burning trash to generate steam for electricity production.
I don’t think landfills still exist anywhere in Northwestern Europe. Below the ‘waste-energy-station’ in my neck of the woods, nearby the city of Nijmegen.
Well, they’re certainly no longer being established legally.However, at least in the country where I live, old, forgotten landfills are constantly being discovered. Often, no one even knows what was dumped there. Some ticking time bombs. Especially when it comes to groundwater.
Yes, no one really knows what was dumped into those old pits/landfills throughout many, many decades in the past.
Oh yes ~ this brings back memories of “packer juice” leaking out of garbage trucks, I worked in one of the city’s Sanitation yards some years ago, interestingly you get accustomed to the stench .
The old trucks leaked packer juice and live maggots at a ferocious rate
-Nate
It is disappointing some of what we recycle isn’t – it ends up with everything else. I’ll still do it diligently though, even saving clear plastic wrap for a designated container at the grocery stores.
I wonder what kind of transmission these trucks had. I’d think for the routine stop and go a basic automatic would have been ideal, kind of like the 2 speed Allison transmission on GMC city buses. Don’t know if DAF and such a unit in that era.
I respect anyone that had the job of riding on the back of the truck. Not just what the job entailed but also being out in all kinds of weather.
Manual transmissions in these classics. Most likely, synchronized 5-speed ZF’s.
Ok, thanks for the information and great article. I guess being synchronized back then may have been an option.
Initially yes, but certainly in such medium-duty trucks, synchronized transmissions were already the norm in the sixties. And as the seventies went by, they became the norm in heavy-duty trucks too. Heavy DAFs often had a Fuller 13-speed in the seventies, roughly post 1980 they all had a synchronized ZF 16-speed. Now almost all heavy-duty trucks come with an automated manual, which is the latest standard.