Look for your city-issued, gray garbage container this summer

CEDAR RAPIDS - Residents here have the green Yardy for yard waste and the blue Curby for recyclables and, this summer, will get the gray Garby for garbage.

The newest city-issued container is a taller, skinnier version of the plastic garbage and designed to be grabbed by an automatic arm and dumped into a garbage truck, Pat Ball, the city's utilities director, told the City Council's Infrastructure Committee on Tuesday.

From July through September, the city plans to deliver 40,000 Garbys to city households at a total cost, covered by revenue from garbage fees, of about $1.4 million, Ball said.

The city will ask residents to begin using the Garbys immediately and to stop using their own garbage cans. The city will have some kind of pick up plan for the cans for residents who decide not to use them for something else, Ball said.

He said one advantage of the Garbys is that residents can jam up to 90 pounds of garbage into one of them because they will be picked up by an automatic device and not workers. Currently, residents are supposed to stuff only 40 pounds of garbage in their own garbage cans.

For now, the city's two-worker crews will use a tipping mechanism on the city's rear-load trucks to dump the Garbys. Eventually, though, the city plans to replace its two-worker garbage trucks with a new fleet of single-worker trucks.

Ball said the move to the new garbage containers, to the automatic lifting and dumping of them and to the single-worker trucks all is coming, in part, to reduce the number of work-related injuries. Employees of the city's solid-waste operation now can lift hundreds of garbage cans a day, making them among the most injury-prone workers in the city, Ball said.

City Manager Jeff Pomeranz recommended the changes, which were approved by the City Council during its budget deliberations earlier this year.

Once the Garby era begins, residents with excess garbage will still be able to put out paper bags with $1.50 stickers on them and up to 40 pounds of garbage in them next to the Garby.

Ball said the city is still working to pick which vendor will supply the Garbys to the city. The city is analyzing carts for sturdiness as well as cost, he said.