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Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

Even that doesn't solve it because the truck is too powerful for the bin. Over time the lid breaks apart from the grabbing and flicking motion. Plus some trash inevitably slips proper placement. And animals are smart.

People are trying to sterilize rats or give them birth control now vs kill them. If you kill a rat, you still have the environment that could support a rat and one is liable to more in from the populations nearby you didn't kill. If you sterilize the rat and release it however, it keeps other new rats from moving in potentially in the maintenance of its territory and it could be doing this job for you for years while you try and sterilize the rest of the area. And eventually these rats will die, and if the great bulk has been sterilized in some way then you may actually eliminate or push back sterile rat populations out of certain areas.

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>>Even that doesn't solve it because the truck is too powerful for the bin. Over time the lid breaks apart from the grabbing and flicking motion.

I feel like you and I live on a different planet. Here in the UK we have those wheelie bins, they get collected using an automated dumpster truck that tips them inside itself, and I'm yet to hear about one of these braking - they are made out of proper thick plastic. Unless by "over time" you mean like 20+ years?

https://www.wheeliebins.co.uk/blogs/news/everything-you-want...

Same here in Oregon. My bins are old (at least 16 years) and same as when I moved in.

I would think that is the truck was too strong, that could be adjusted. Or if city bought weak bins, they could be replaced by proper ones.

Here is the truck in action. I get only a couple years before the lid starts fragmenting at the corners and sometimes breaks at the hinge.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXiywhZxZis

That looks like the standard bin and the claw is similar. But trucks here are gentler.

My guess is that your city designed trucks for speed at expense of destroying cans.

Australian checking in. Our wheelie bin lids cark it every decade or two, but I'd attribute that to sun exposure degrading them. The mechanical impact is just what finishes the job.

No they last about 2 or 3 years in my experience, depending on how lucky you get with them. Everyone's bin is at least somewhat damaged. A few are missing the top entirely. I've replaced a bad bin once, free service from the city, but the replacement is already starting to crack on the corners where it slaps down onto the tips of the metal claw holding the bin. It is quite violent how it slaps the lid. Here is a video of the units they use:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXiywhZxZis

So no one cares that the trucks are clearly overpowered for the job and destroying bins every 2-3 years when other countries(maybe even other places in the US too?) have identical bins lasting 2 decades without any problem, even when using trucks that automatically dump the contents? Do you pay for replacement bins as residents, or does the city provide them? Either way, seems incredibly wasteful for something that is absolutely a solved problem.

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