Welcome to trash University where new hires with the city’s Solid Waste Department get a crash, er, trash course in picking them up and putting them down. Trash bags that is.

Thursday morning at the city’s Public Works facility off Chouteau and Front Street, the Solid Waste Department offered a clinic on how to properly pick up trash bags off the curb and safely put them in a moving packer truck and keep that truck moving down a city street on its route.

Each truck will average 1600 stops a day and at the end of an 8-hour shift will have packed over 26,000 pounds of trash and the workers on that truck will have averaged roughly 10 to 12 miles on foot. All in most any kind of weather.

According to Michael Shaw the division manager for the city’s Solid Waste Department, doing it right is no easy task.

“These new hires right now are learning how to operate the truck, how to properly pick up trash, how to communicate with their driver and how to move the truck down the street and interact safely with traffic within our neighborhoods” Shaw said. “It takes alot to do this day in and day out and do it safely, cleanly and in a timely manner.”

All of this is in preparation for May 1st when the city takes over trash collection on a Citywide basis, doing away with using independent contractors to pick up trash.

The roughly seventy five new Solid Waste workers will go through a variety of work scenarios designed to acclimate them to the task of safely, and efficiently picking up residential trash in Kansas City Missouri.

Shaw indicated that some of the new crew could be staffing trucks for the upcoming community clean up on Saturday, April 4th. “If you see our guys out there, let them know you appreciate them and what they do,” Shaw said.