A male black bear took an improbable road trip after he hitched a ride on a garbage truck and ended up in downtown Vancouver, Canada, Monday.

Believed to be up to 18 months old, the bear was caught on video roaming on top of a garbage truck as conservation officers climbed the truck in order to tranquillize the bear, all in the heart of downtown Vancouver. It’s unclear where the bear hitched the ride.

While the bear’s appearance surprised many city residents, Dave Cox, a conservation officer with the British Columbia Conservation Officer Service, says it makes sense that a bear ended up in the back of a garbage truck.

“Bears are a very opportunistic animal.”  Cox said of the chance that a bear would get into a garbage truck. “He would probably just climb inside and find a whole bunch of used garbage and had a big feast.”

Once in Vancouver, Cox says, the bear was spotted after sticking his head from the truck.

While Cox says the bear initially appeared nervous as officers approached him,  the bear’s appetite actually kept him calm as officers prepared to tranquillize him.

“His priority is food. No one is harassing him too much and he has a food source in front him,” Cox said. “He’s occupied. ”

While bears and other wild animals are not a common site on the streets of Vancouver, this is not the first time in recent months that a wild animal made its way into an urban area in British Columbia. A cougar was shot Dec. 8 by police officials after being spotted at a ferry terminal in Victoria, Canada.

Luckily for the black bear, officials deemed the unlikely hitchhiker a good candidate to be released back into the wild, because he did not act aggressive or confrontational. “The bear had no priors with us,” Cox said.

As news of a bear in the city captivated residents, a twitter feed started Monday afternoon titled @downtown_bear. Tweeting from the bear’s point of view, it laid out his plans for the day.

“Swim over to Granville island for lunch. I hear their dumpsters are organic,” read one tweet.

In spite of what the tweets reported, the bear was actually tranquillized and tagged before being released back into the wild near Whistler, Canada, earlier this week.


Article From: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2011/12/hitchhiking-bear-ends-up-on-garbage-truck-in-vancouver/

By Jim Johnson | WRN senior reporter

Nov. 29 (Bristol, Vt.) -- Pat Palmer´s trash collection vehicle runs only on two horsepower.Real horsepower, that is.

Their names are Jerry and Jake, a pair of dapple gray Persheron draft horses that wind their way through Bristol every Friday morning, pulling a wooden trash collection wagon designed to look like a sleigh.

Clip-clop, clip-clop – the sound of the horses´ shoes hitting the asphalt serves as a rhythmic soundtrack to what has become a 14-year tradition in this quiet town of about 3,750 people.

Palmer and helper Lynda Malzac are familiar faces to those along their route, where residents put out an average of about 150 bags of trash each week for collection. But they are not the stars of the show.

On a recent Friday, a woman from California was out snapping photographs, saying that there´s no such service where she lives – hardly a surprise.

At another point, a father and infant daughter waited patiently by their bags of trash with a bribe.

Would a plate of cookies be enough to allow them to jump on board for a little ride along the trash route? Sure enough.

"A lot of people just want to ride for the fun of it. A lot of townspeople do it," Palmer said. "It´s fresh air. I think it´s very calming. The outside of a horse is good for the inside of a person, and that´s not an original quote."


Read the rest of this article here! http://www.wasterecyclingnews.com/headlines2.html?cat=1&id=1322579103

The Refuse winner of the 2011 Rodeo in San Antonio was Mark Jones of Denver, who was awarded $5000, with Nathan Buffington of Phoenix placing second and grabbing $4000. 

Read more from this article here: http://www.truckinginfo.com/news/news-detail.asp?news_id=75542&news_category_id=10

Sanitation worker part girlie girl, part tomboy
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Saturday, December 10 2011, 7:23 PM

A willowy blonde with perfectly polished nails and Dolce & Gabbana glasses is turning heads as she tosses trash into a truck.

Meet Mary Ellen Connolly, one of six women to graduate the city Sanitation Department’s 2011 class. She and 119 other haulers will be sworn in by Mayor Bloomberg Wednesday.

Working as one of New York’s Strongest is not for the faint of heart. Each worker lifts five to seven tons of garbage per day — from trash bags of rotten food to living room furniture to washing machines.

The job is tough, but also recession-proof — after all, the city residents create 12,000 tons of refuse a day.

Connolly, 36, said she couldn’t be happier in her new career.

“ I wish some of my girlfriends would do it,” Connolly said last week. “ It’s a great job.”

She’s obviously not a woman who says “eww” much.

“I’ m not squeamish at all,” she said. “ I was an X-ray technician in the trauma slot at Bellevue Hospital for 12 years, so I've seen a lot.”

The Queens native said she has always been athletic, playing sports in high school and faithfully hitting the gym for a blast of cardio and weight-lifting.

As I try to keep up with her on her Far Rockaway route, I imagine she can skip the gym, now that she does the waste can workout.

"I I like it, because I’ m outside and I’ m moving around,” she said. “And I liked helping people when I was an X-ray tech, and this is helping people, too.”

Anybody who lived through the Sanitation workers’ strike in the 1970s knows Connolly speaks the truth.

Like all 6,000 uniformed members of the city’ s Sanitation Department — the world’ s largest — Connolly had to pass a strenuous test, dragging bags and cans through an obstacle course.

Then she got the call that she would start 30 days of intense training in October, driving big-bruiser trucks and snowplows.

The timing wasn’t ideal — her wedding to restaurant manager Sean McCallion was scheduled a few days before the start of training.

“I spent my honeymoon at Floyd Bennett Field,” Connolly said.

She and the five other female newbies are far from the first women on the force, says the department’ s Chief Keith Mellis.


Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/meet-member-york-city-sexiest-strongest-article-1.989851#ixzz1gKgNmeZy

Nov. 30 -- The General Motor’s Fort Wayne Assembly Plant in Indiana now diverts all of its waste from landfills.The facility is GM´s first assembly plant to reach to that goal, according to the News-Sentinel newspaper in Fort Wayne.

GM recycles around 92% of their waste worldwide, but the company still generates 2.5 million tons of waste. That’s enough to fill the beds of 6.8 million pick-up trucks, the paper reported.

Recycling efforts at the Fort Wayne plant generated $2 million in revenue in 2010 while also saving $1 million by using methane power from a landfill to power several boilers.

"We´ve always looked at Fort Wayne as being progressive and innovative," said John Bradburn, GM´s manager of waste-reduction efforts. "People don´t want to be wasteful. It´s really about finding innovative ways to get things done."

Article From: http://www.wasterecyclingnews.com/corporate_sustainability/corporate-sustainability.html?id=1322665763