Time Machine

Garbage and recycling collectors

Name: Refuse and Recyclable Material Collectors: employment and wages since 1896
Creator: Future History
License: https://futurehistory.earth/terms

Official title Refuse and Recyclable Material Collectors (SOC 53-7081)

Also called Garbage collector, Sanitation worker, Waste collector, Recycling collector, Trash collector

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 147,240 US garbage and recycling collectors, with median pay of $49,690 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2003, the May 2025 count is the highest. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 2,000 from 1896, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for garbage and recycling collectors: Telematics, GPS routing + in-cab tablets, 2010 to 2023.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 2.1% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

23.2% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023
0.93 estimated probability that the whole occupation could be computerised, over an unspecified number of years. Not a forecast of job losses. Frey and Osborne, 2013

Since the 2013 prediction

In 2013, Frey and Osborne put this job's probability of computerisation at 0.93. BLS counted 116,460 of these jobs in May 2013 and 147,240 in May 2025 (+26%, a change derived by Future History).

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend. In May 2021 BLS changed how it estimates these counts (a model-based method using three years of survey data) and moved fully to the 2018 occupation codes, so part of a change across 2021 can come from the method rather than the work.

Last updated 11 October 2026.

Cite this page

APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Garbage and recycling collectors: jobs and pay since 1896 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/53-7081

Chicago

Future History. "Garbage and recycling collectors: jobs and pay since 1896." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/53-7081.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_53_7081, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Garbage and recycling collectors: jobs and pay since 1896}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/53-7081}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

The access date is today's date on your device.

drag to travel through time

19001925195019752000now

2026

Known then as Street Cleaner / Sanitation Man ("White Wings", municipal-force era)

Known then as Garbage Collector / Refuse Collector (motorized packer-truck era)

Known then as Sanitation Worker / Solid Waste Collector (recycling-program era)

Known then as Refuse and Recyclable Material Collectors (BLS SOC 53-7081)

Known today as Refuse and Recyclable Material Collectors (BLS SOC 53-7081)

Projected to still be called Refuse and Recyclable Material Collectors (BLS SOC 53-7081)

Data from the May 2025 survey

US Employment

147K

Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic

Report an error

Median Annual Wage

$49,690

Est.

≈ $48,416 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic

Report an error

Beat · 1895

Colonel George E. Waring Jr. takes charge of New York City's Department of Street Cleaning and organizes the "White Wings," the first professional, uniformed municipal sanitation force in the United States. He institutes regular routes, source separation of waste into ashes, rubbish, garbage, and sweepings, and the principle that local government bears full responsibility for collecting and disposing of its own waste. Within two years New York's notoriously filthy streets are transformed, and the model spreads to cities nationwide.

Beat · 1938

The Garwood Load Packer introduces the hydraulic compactor to the garbage truck, periodically crushing the load and roughly doubling a truck's capacity. Together with the 1929 mechanical hopper and George Dempster's 1937 Dempster-Dumpster wheeled containers (the origin of the word "dumpster"), compaction begins the long mechanization of the job, taking the heaviest lifting off human shoulders and cutting the number of trips a crew makes to the dump.

Beat · 1968

On February 12, 1968, more than 1,300 Black sanitation workers in Memphis go on strike after two collectors, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, are crushed to death in a malfunctioning truck. Working full time yet poor enough that many qualified for welfare, they march under the slogan "I Am a Man," demanding union recognition, safety, and a living wage. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. comes to Memphis to support them and is assassinated there on April 4. The strike, settled days later, became a defining event linking the garbage collector's job to the labor and civil-rights movements and to the union pay scales that lifted the wage thereafter.

Beat · 1969

Scottsdale, Arizona puts the world's first automated side loader into service, a truck whose hydraulic arm empties a standardized curbside cart in about 30 seconds without the driver leaving the cab. Over the following decades this technology, paired with the standardized wheeled cart, collapses the traditional three-person rear-loader crew toward a single driver-operator, the largest labor-displacement event in the occupation's history, while sharply improving safety by removing collectors from the back step and from repetitive heavy lifting.

Beat · 2025

At CES in January 2025, Oshkosh and Republic Services demonstrate AI-powered, fully electric garbage trucks that scan loads with computer vision to flag lithium-ion batteries and contamination before they reach a facility, addressing a wave of dangerous battery fires in trucks and recycling plants. The same show features McNeilus/Oshkosh's HARR-E, an autonomous refuse-collection robot prototype. The technology signals where the job is heading, AI watching the load and optimizing the route, while the autonomous truck stays pre-commercial and the human collector stays in the cab.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

How it began · 1895

For most of American history nobody was responsible for the garbage. In the cities of the early 1800s, household waste, food scraps, ashes, and animal carcasses were thrown into the street, where roaming pigs ate what they could and the rest rotted. What collection existed was done by private scavengers and carters who hauled refuse for a fee, by night-soil men who emptied privies after dark, and by rag-and-bone pickers who scratched a living out of what others discarded. The job of the modern municipal collector did not exist because the idea behind it, that a city owes its residents clean streets and reliable waste removal, did not yet exist. That changed in 1895, when Colonel George E. Waring Jr. took over New York City's Department of Street Cleaning. A Civil War engineer who had built a sewer system in Memphis after a yellow-fever epidemic, Waring believed disease bred in filth and that government, not the market, should be accountable for removing it. He organized the first professional, uniformed municipal cleaning force in the United States, the "White Wings," dressed in white to signal hygiene, given regular routes, badges, and a quasi-military discipline. Just as importantly, he had the city separate its waste at the source into ashes, dry rubbish, food garbage, and street sweepings, the first municipal source-separation and recycling program in the country. Within two years New York's streets were transformed, and other American cities copied the model. The man who shows up at the curb today with a truck and a hydraulic arm is the descendant of those White Wings: a worker doing what a city decided, more than a century ago, it had a duty to do.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace garbage and recycling collectors? What the research says

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.

What published forecasts say

Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey marks a small change, 3% or less either way.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

→ 2035

+2.1%

BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 53-7081 (Refuse and recyclable material collectors): 156.4 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 159.6 thousand in 2035, a change of +3.2 thousand (+2.1%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (3.8% of this occupation in 2025). The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.

Official statisticReport an error

How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)

Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.

Frey & Osborne (2013), "The Future of Employment"

2013 study · Probability of computerisation (2013 model)

93%

probability

What this measures

Published appendix value for SOC 2010 53-7081 Refuse and Recyclable Material Collectors: probability of computerisation 0.93, rank 585 of 702 (rank 1 is least computerisable). Frey and Osborne estimated in 2013, with a Gaussian-process classifier on O*NET variables, how likely the whole occupation is to be technically automatable over "some unspecified number of years, perhaps a decade or two". It is a probability for the occupation, not a share of tasks and not a forecast of jobs lost.

Official statisticReport an error

Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"

2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)

23.2%

of tasks

What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 53-7081.00 Refuse and Recyclable Material Collectors. Shown: human-rated β = 0.232, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0.107 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.357; GPT-4-rated β 0.196. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error

Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for garbage and recycling collectors

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is sitting alongside you hereDocument service exceptions (blocked driveways, overloaded bins, missed pickups) via in-cab tablet or voice note

Document service exceptions (blocked driveways, overloaded bins, missed pickups) via in-cab tablet or voice note; vehicle-mounted cameras auto-capture timestamped photo evidence for the dispatch system, eliminating separate written reports.^[4],[8]

Tools picking this up

Routeware Elements ↗AMCS Vision AI ↗

Where your edge is

Use photo-evidence workflows consistently so dispatchers have accurate data to resolve customer disputes without sending you back to the address.

AI is sitting alongside you hereScan collected loads for hazardous materials using AI-powered on-board cameras that flag lithium-ion batteries, chemicals, and contaminated recyclables before the truck reaches the transfer station or MRF.

Scan collected loads for hazardous materials using AI-powered on-board cameras that flag lithium-ion batteries, chemicals, and contaminated recyclables before the truck reaches the transfer station or MRF.^[6],[8]

Tools picking this up

AMCS Vision AI ↗Oshkosh AI Load Scanning (Republic Services) ↗

Where your edge is

Know how to interpret camera alerts and follow the hauler's hazmat containment protocol, since AI flags loads but a human makes the final call on whether to divert.

AI is sitting alongside you hereFollow AI-optimized daily routes delivered to an in-cab tablet each morning, with turn-by-turn guidance that dynamically resequences stops based on real-time fill-level sensor data from smart bins and live traffic conditions.

Follow AI-optimized daily routes delivered to an in-cab tablet each morning, with turn-by-turn guidance that dynamically resequences stops based on real-time fill-level sensor data from smart bins and live traffic conditions.^[9],[5],[10]

Tools picking this up

Routeware Elements ↗AMCS Platform ↗

Where your edge is

Understand how the route algorithm weighs fill-level versus time-window constraints so you can override intelligently when sensor data lags or a bin is inaccessible.

Where garbage and recycling collectors go next

Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.

Hazardous Materials Removal Workers
US median pay
$49,450 (May 2025)
BLS outlook 2025-35
+1.5%
First-Line Supervisors of Material-Moving Machine and Vehicle OperatorsNo timeline for this role yet
Heavy and Tractor-Trailer Truck Drivers
US median pay
$58,640 (May 2025)
BLS outlook 2025-35
+3.8%

What each move takes

A direction you could grow

Hazardous Materials Removal Workers

Collectors who develop hazardous-material awareness through battery-detection and contamination-flagging systems can transition into hazmat removal work, which commands higher wages and stronger long-term demand from environmental remediation and e-waste streams. Requires formal hazmat certification but builds directly on safety-inspection habits already practiced on the route.

What you'd add

· 40-hour HAZWOPER certification (OSHA 1910.120)
· PPE selection and donning/doffing procedures
· Hazardous-material manifest and chain-of-custody documentation
· Spill containment and emergency response protocols

What it takesSome new skills to pick up

Tools of the era

How has the work of garbage and recycling collectors changed since 1895?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

Horse-drawn ash cart + hand collection (White Wings municipal era)
The first municipal collectors worked almost entirely by hand and muscle. Refuse, ashes, and food garbage were shoveled or carried into open horse-drawn carts, hauled to dumps, incinerators, or the waterfront, and tipped by hand. The job was sorting, lifting, and hauling, with no mechanical assistance beyond the horse. Waring's innovation was organizational rather than technological: regular routes, uniforms, badges, source separation, and the principle that the city itself owned the work.
Effect on the work
Establishing organized municipal collection created the occupation outright, converting ad hoc private scavenging into a stable, badged, salaried public workforce in city after city through the early 1900s.
Motor refuse truck (open-body and tipping trucks replacing horse carts)
The first motorized garbage trucks appeared at the turn of the century: in 1897 the Chiswick District Council in England ordered a steam "motor tip-car" built for the collection of dust and house refuse, and gasoline trucks spread through American cities in the 1910s and 1920s. The early motor truck did not change what the collector did with his hands, the loading was still manual lifting into an open body, but it dramatically extended how far a crew could range in a day and how much it could haul, beginning the long shift from many small horse routes to fewer, longer motor routes.
Mechanical hopper + Dempster-Dumpster + hydraulic packer (Garwood Load Packer, 1938)
Three inventions in quick succession mechanized the worst of the lifting. Around 1929 a cable-and-hopper mechanism let crews load waste at waist height instead of hoisting it shoulder-high into an open truck. In 1937 George Dempster introduced the Dempster-Dumpster, standardized wheeled containers that a truck could mechanically tip into itself (giving the world the word "dumpster"). And in 1938 the Garwood Load Packer added a hydraulic compactor that periodically crushed the load, roughly doubling how much a single truck could carry before a trip to the dump. Together these turned the truck from a passive box into an active machine and cut both the physical strain and the number of trips per route.
Effect on the work
Compaction and containerization roughly doubled effective truck capacity and reduced trips to disposal, letting smaller crews cover more stops, an early example of technology raising output per collector rather than eliminating the collector.
Rear-loader and side-loader packer trucks (Leach Packmaster 1947, PakMor side loader 1947)
In 1947 two designs that still define the job arrived. Leach introduced the Packmaster, a hydraulic rear-load packer that became the archetypal three-person crew truck: a driver plus two loaders riding the back step, hooking and tipping cans into the hopper. The same year PakMor patented a side-loading body. Through the 1950s and 1960s the rear loader with a riding crew was the standard American collection vehicle, and the daily rhythm of the job, ride the step, jump off at each stop, empty the cans, signal the driver forward, was set by this machine.
Automated side loader (Scottsdale, Arizona, 1969) + standardized wheeled carts
In 1969 the city of Scottsdale, Arizona deployed the world's first automated side loader, a truck whose hydraulic arm grabbed a standardized cart at the curb and emptied it into the body in a roughly cycle, all without the driver leaving the cab. Paired with the standardized wheeled cart issued to every household, the automated side loader is the single most consequential change in the history of the role: it collapsed the three-person rear-loader crew toward a single driver-operator and removed most of the manual lifting that had defined the work since 1895. Adoption spread through the 1980s and 1990s alongside the curbside-recycling boom, which added a parallel collection stream.
Effect on the work
The automated side loader cut crew size on adopting routes from roughly three workers to one driver-operator, the largest single labor-displacement event in the occupation's history, while improving safety by removing collectors from the back step and from repetitive heavy lifting. Total employment still rose over the long run because waste volumes and recycling streams grew.
Telematics, GPS routing + in-cab tablets (Routeware, AMCS)
Through the 2010s the cab of the truck filled with software. GPS telematics, in-cab tablets, and fleet platforms such as Routeware and the AMCS Platform replaced the paper route sheet: routes were planned and resequenced from the office, driver behavior and fuel use were scored, service exceptions (a blocked driveway, an overfilled bin) were logged with timestamped photo evidence, and predictive-maintenance alerts scheduled truck service before a breakdown. None of this removed the collector from the curb; it moved dispatch, documentation, and routing off paper and onto a screen, and made the collector a node in a tracked, data-driven operation.
AI route optimization + computer-vision load scanning + autonomous prototypes
The current era puts AI in two places: in the route and at the tailgate. AI route engines (AMCS, NextBillion, Routeware) resequence stops in near-real time using smart-bin fill-level sensors and live traffic, and onboard computer vision (AMCS Vision AI, Oshkosh/Republic load scanning shown at CES in January 2025) scans loads for lithium-ion batteries, chemicals, and recycling contamination before they reach the facility, catching the battery fires that have plagued the industry. Fully autonomous collection robots exist as prototypes (McNeilus/Oshkosh HARR-E, shown at CES 2025) but remain pre-commercial. For now AI is an augmentation layer: it optimizes and watches, while a human still drives the route and makes the final call on a flagged hazard or an inaccessible bin.
Effect on the work
No measurable employment displacement to date. AI route and vision tools raise efficiency and safety for the collector who uses them; autonomous collection trucks remain prototypes with no commercial fleet deployment as of 2026, so near-term headcount pressure is modest.

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Refuse and Recyclable Material Collectors employment and pay by year

On record since1895

Latest US employment147,240 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error

Latest US median pay$49,690 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error

Outlook+2.1% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error

View all 27 years of cited US data, each linked to its source

Year	US employment	Annual pay (median unless marked)	Source	Report
1896	2,000	n/a	Est., HISTORY Researched context	Report
1950	90,000	n/a	Census (IPUMS) Researched context	Report
1968	n/a	$3,400	Est., Wikipedia Researched context	Report
2000	118,910	n/a	BLS OEWS 2000 Official statistic	Report
2003	138,480	$24,040	BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statistic	Report
2004	139,920	$25,760	BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statistic	Report
2005	133,930	$28,460	BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statistic	Report
2006	125,770	$28,970	BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statistic	Report
2007	126,270	$29,420	BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statistic	Report
2008	129,080	$31,050	BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statistic	Report
2009	128,940	$32,070	BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statistic	Report
2010	126,360	$32,640	BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statistic	Report
2011	123,160	$32,280	BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statistic	Report
2012	117,670	$32,930	BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statistic	Report
2013	116,460	$32,720	BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statistic	Report
2014	115,170	$33,660	BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statistic	Report
2015	114,220	$33,800	BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statistic	Report
2016	114,680	$35,270	BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statistic	Report
2017	115,130	$36,160	BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statistic	Report
2018	118,520	$37,260	BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statistic	Report
2019	121,330	$37,840	BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statistic	Report
2020	120,850	$39,100	BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statistic	Report
2021	126,050	$38,500	BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statistic	Report
2022	132,240	$43,540	BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statistic	Report
2023	135,430	$45,760	BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statistic	Report
2024	139,180	$48,350	BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statistic	Report
2025	147,240	$49,690	BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statistic	Report

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Where garbage and recycling collectors go next

Hazardous Materials Removal Workers

Horse-drawn ash cart + hand collection (White Wings municipal era)Horse-drawn ash cart + hand collection1895–1929

Motor refuse truck (open-body and tipping trucks replacing horse carts)Motor refuse truck1897–1937

Mechanical hopper + Dempster-Dumpster + hydraulic packer (Garwood Load Packer, 1938)Mechanical hopper + Dempster-Dumpster +…1929–1955

Rear-loader and side-loader packer trucks (Leach Packmaster 1947, PakMor side loader 1947)Rear-loader1947–1969

Automated side loader (Scottsdale, Arizona, 1969) + standardized wheeled cartsAutomated side loader1969–2000

Telematics, GPS routing + in-cab tablets (Routeware, AMCS)Telematics2010–2023

AI route optimization + computer-vision load scanning + autonomous prototypesAI route optimization + computer-vision…2023–present

Refuse and Recyclable Material Collectors employment and pay by year

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