One of the challenges facing every community is the collection and disposal of refuse, such as household and commercial garbage. Generally, the refuse is ultimately disposed of at a permanent, sanitary landfill location, although certain types of garbage may be incinerated. It is desirable to provide for methods and systems that tidily, efficiently and economically collect and transport the refuse to the ultimate disposal site.
In densely populated urban areas, relatively small collection vehicles have traditionally collected refuse from individual house-holds and dwelling-places and directly transported the collected refuse to a nearby landfill site. This is economically inefficient because of the relatively small capacity of the collection vehicles, resulting in a relatively high cost of transporting a given weight of refuse.
Remote rural communities face added challenges because they are typically nowhere near a landfill site. Accordingly, it is often necessary for these communities to transport their collected refuse to far-away landfill sites. In order to maximize the cost efficiency of this added burden, the refuse transportation is often done via large transportation trucks which have a much greater capacity than the aforementioned collection vehicles. It is thus important to provide a location in or around remote communities where refuse can be collected, temporarily stored and ultimately transferred to the large trucks for its ultimate haul to a landfill site.
It has proven difficult to address these challenges in an effective manner. Canadian Patent No. 1,132,329, issued Sep. 28, 1982 to Neufeldt, represents one attempt. Neufeldt discloses a refuse disposal method and apparatus which utilizes a transfer container adapted to receive refuse from collection vehicles and discharge the refuse into larger transportation vehicles. Neufeldt accomplishes this by providing the transfer container mounted alongside a steep embankment so that the collection vehicles can approach same via a gentle ramp and backfill the hopper portion of the container. Ultimately, Neufeldt's container is pivoted, resulting in a "tilted" dumping of the refuse into a transportation vehicle located below the container and adjacent the steep embankment.
Neufeldt, however, has inherent disadvantages. First, the physical landscape required to accommodate the container assembly is impractical. Naturally-occurring locations offering a steep embankment of such a height and configuration to accommodate the Neufeldt assembly are rare. Accordingly, it will usually be necessary to construct a steep embankment through piling and shaping dirt, gravel or the like to a suitable height and providing suitable roads to accommodate the collection and transportation vehicles. Not only is this process extremely expensive, but it is also environmentally-unfriendly since it will be very difficult to reclaim the site should the collection container be moved in the future.
Second, Neufeldt does not offer the users the ability to regulate the amount of refuse "dumped" from the container to the transportation truck. Instead, the container is simply "tilted", thereby dumping the entirety of its contents. This is acceptable for transportation trucks which have the capacity for all of the collected refuse. However, transportation trucks may arrive at a particular remote community partially full because the same truck services numerous communities in the same trip. Thus, if a transportation truck already contains sufficient refuse so that it cannot accept the entirety of the contents of the Neufeldt container, the user is faced with one of two undesirable choices. First, he can bypass accepting the refuse at that time and simply collect it on another trip. This is disadvantageous because: (a) the transportation vehicle would be returning with less than 100% capacity, thus descreasing the cost-effectiveness of the operation; and (b) the remote community may not have the capacity to store the collected refuse while awaiting a second trip sometime later. The alternative to refusing to accept the refuse is to simply dump the container and let the excess spill over the top of the transportation vehicle. This is obviously disadvantageous since the spillage would require clean-up, or if it were not cleaned up, would be unsightly and would produce unpleasant odours and attract scavenging animals.
Accordingly, the present invention provides an efficient, cost-effective and self-contained apparatus and a method that allows a user to regulate the amount of collected refuse transferred to a transportation vehicle in any given dump.