Trash is an incredibly unsightly blot on the landscape. From plastic bags floating in the air to pieces of newspaper and wrappers gathered in the corners of our streets, it’s almost impossible to escape from. This is when the wonderful invention called the street sweeper comes in handy. Sucking up debris in parking lots and cleaning our residential and urban streets, a street sweeper chugs along, maintaining the roads we take for granted.
The Unnoticed Pollution
How often do you notice the slowly accumulating pile of leaves, paper, and plastic by your home? It’s probably not very often unless a rainstorm pushes it all towards the nearest drain, blocking off the water’s path, causing the street to flood. Even if you give those pollutants a thought, do you think about the ones you can’t see? Microscopic pollutants mix with water during a rainstorm or because of melting snow, eventually mixing with our water supply. Water pouring off of roads, bridges, parking lots, and rooftops collect a whole bunch of toxins we should work harder at gathering and disposing of before they reach our water supply. These toxins include heavy metals, pesticides, oil, grease, automobile chemicals, road salts, and viruses and bacteria from failing septic systems. Methods of parking lot vacuum services and road sweeping services can remove tons of debris each year from the streets and parking lots, keeping this nasty stuff out of our water supply.
Facts About Sweeper Trucks
People got tired of looking at trash as early as the 1800s, so the first sweeping machine was created and patented in 1849 by C.S. Bishop. Today, trucks carry around street sweepers and vacuum various large debris, such as paper and leaves, as well as the smaller pollutants, such as the aforementioned ones, up from the curb gutters. The most popular sweeper machine style uses mechanical brooms to maintain the roads. Parking lot vacuum trucks clean up the dirty parking lots we all use. Parking lots are responsible for between $6 and $23 in environmental and health damages each year, adding up to between $4 billion and $20 billion annually — now just imagine if they weren’t cleaned. Studies show that parking lot vacuum trucks do a lot more than just clean up the parking areas — they also attract customers with a clean, presentable exterior.
Industry Facts
Though often unthought-of, this is incredibly lucrative. The street sweeping service employs almost 135,000 people and makes $42 billion in revenue each year with only fewer than 10,000 companies. The industry as a whole has made around $283 million in revenue in the United States alone. Not bad for an industry hardly anyone thinks of.
Next time you notice a piece of trash flying off from your garbage can, don’t ignore it. While road cleaning services will pick it up, just think of the pollution we all contribute to. Now imagine if these companies left all of those pollutants around — what would the world be like?