Plymouth's ageing fleet of rubbish lorries is to be replaced as part of an improvement programme aimed at making the city's waste operation better and greener.The new lorries will be tailor-made to suit the needs of Plymouth, with its hills and high number of back lanes with tight access.
The city council's Cabinet is expected to give the go-ahead for 29 vehicles to be bought when it meets on September 4.
The new fleet will have vehicles of four different-sizes. They will be allocated to new zones across the city in the New Year.
Although the details are still being worked out, the zones will enable smaller vehicles to feed back into the larger vehicles, to keep tip runs down.
The council now has 30 vehicles in its on-road refuse fleet. The lease on most of the vehicles will expire by next June.
Because of the age of the trucks, there have been a high number of breakdowns, forcing the council to hire vehicles for the waste and recycling rounds.
The new fleet could arrive as early as February 2008. The council has used the services of a local authority buying and distribution consortium, which is evaluating eight tenders.
All I can say is - at last! The City Council used to have a good smart fleet of dustcarts, with regular deliveries of three or four new trucks each year which resulted in a good balanced fleet of trucks in several different sizes and featuring quite a few different makes. Back in the late 1980's they introduced a smart two tone green livery although this was replaced by a plain white livery in the 1990's. The past few years has seen little investment in the fleet and now all we see are mainly loaned trucks. It will be interesting to see what they actually end up buying, and I do hope that they will recieve some sort of special livery - although I expect it will be the 'Recycle Plymouth' livery just stuck on the sides of plain white trucks. Good news all the same.
One of the loaned trucks is pictured above, a DAF LF with Ros Roca bodywork, presumably a demonstration loan rather than a standard loan?
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