Garbys will arrive at Cedar Rapids homes this summer

Starting in July, City Hall will begin its rollout of new, light-gray-colored, 35-gallon Garby garbage cans to nearly 40,000 Cedar Rapids residents.

The City Council this week picked a vendor, Rehrig Pacific Co., Pleasant Prairie, Wis., to provide the new Garbys.

The Garbys will join the blue Curby for recyclables and the dark-green Yardy for yard waste in Cedar Rapids homes. All are city-issued, paid for with customers' garbage and recycling fees.

In a photo provided by the city on Thursday, the Garby looks a little smaller than the Curby and considerably smaller than the Yardy.

The Garby is a taller, skinner version of a plastic garbage can and is designed to be grabbed by an automatic arm and dumped into a garbage truck.

Eventually, the city plans to replace its existing garbage trucks with single-operator trucks. For now, the city's two-man crews will use an existing tipping mechanism on the back of the city's current fleet of trucks.

Pat Ball, the city's utilities director, has said the city hoped to have a Garby distributed to every garbage customer between July and September. The city will require residents to use the Garby once they get one. Residents can still put out extra bags if they attach a city sticker for $1.50 to them.

The city's initial purchase from Rehrig will be for 38,800 Garbys at a total cost not to exceed $1,460,800. Four vendors competed for the contract. Rehrig's bid exceeded another by about $128,000, but the city concluded that the Rehrig container was more structurally sound and easier for automatic tippers to handle.