Aside from keeping streets clean, they also help reduce the intensity of floods during heavy rains, and they help prevent water pollution since they keep toxic waste chemicals on the road from reaching the lakes, streams, oceans, and public waterways.
If the conventional street sweeper works by swishing brooms left to right and collecting garbage in a dustpan and a waste bin, the street sweepers work almost in the same way but in a larger scale and with additional features. Street sweeping trucks come in different types – there are trucks that use brushes to clean the streets, while there are those that clean using air. These trucks are very powerful, and they are capable of finishing the street cleaning in a relatively short amount of time. Because of their intimidating sizes, motors and their mechanisms, these street sweeping trucks are generally noisy when they are doing their job.
Many communities use the conventional type of street sweeping truck. With this kind of truck, water is sprayed through the jets underneath it, in order to control the amount of dust particles that spiral into the air. While that is happening, brushes spin to clean the gutter and the street. After dirt is removed, they will be swept by a cylindrical brush into a conveyor belt that brings the collected waste into a container, or they will be vacuumed into the waste receptacle.
On the other hand, there are also regenerative air sweeper trucks, which are designed to clean paved streets with air. They possess hydraulic systems that pump air from jets to loosen and remove dirt on the road, and then they are swirled unto the center of the truck. The dust is then vacuumed into the waste receptacle. The air in the waste receptacle gets filtered and then reused to repeat the entire process of loosening and removing the dirt, while water is also squirted to keep flying dust particles to a minimum.
Street sweeper trucks greatly benefit neighborhoods, construction sites, airport runways and every paved street in the city that they can sweep; however, their cleaning jobs can only be successful if there is equal cooperation with the residents. Sweeping can be effectively done only on areas of the streets where there are no cars parked and where there are no low hanging trees that can possibly keep them from crossing. It is therefore important that residents should take note of the time when street sweeping will be conducted, so that they will know when they should avoid parking their truck on the street. It is also important that they should keep their shrubs and trees pruned.