Revopak

The Revopak is a type of

waste collection vehicle A garbage truck is a truck specially designed to collect municipal solid waste and transport it to a solid waste treatment facility, such as a landfill, recycling center or transfer station. In Australia they are commonly called rubbish truc ...

manufactured by the British company

Shelvoke and Drewry Shelvoke and Drewry was a Letchworth, Hertfordshire manufacturer of special purpose commercial vehicles. It was best known for its innovative waste collection vehicles that were the preferred choice of municipal authorities in the UK together ...

. Introduced in 1971, the Revopak was a British-built clone of the French Bennes-Ray "Superpac".{{cn, date=April 2020 It was one of the first vehicles to address the problem of compacting and destroying the high content of packaging materials now found in domestic refuse. By using a huge,

hydraulic Hydraulics (from Greek: Υδραυλική) is a technology and applied science using engineering, chemistry, and other sciences involving the mechanical properties and use of liquids. At a very basic level, hydraulics is the liquid counter ...

-powered rotating rake with large steel tines, refuse was scooped up from the loading hopper and forced through a set of stationary tines. The rotation of the rake increases the density of the load by continuously lifting the waste, mutilating it through the stationary tines, and then dropping it and repeating the cycle until it is small enough to be forced into the main body, where it is compacted, thus reducing the space required to dump it at the landfill site. Two generations of the Revopak were produced - the early 1971-1973 models used hydraulic motors which drove the compaction rake by means of chains, while the later models used a simpler and more robust drive system which consisted of twin synchronised

hydraulic ram A hydraulic ram, or hydram, is a cyclic water pump powered by hydropower. It takes in water at one " hydraulic head" (pressure) and flow rate, and outputs water at a higher hydraulic head and lower flow rate. The device uses the water hammer e ...

s to operate the compaction system. Many variations were made of the basic design, including a multitude of different body lengths and payloads, plus SD developed bin lifters as an optional extra - a precursor to the modern wheeled bin collection systems of today. One disadvantage of the system was heavier fuel consumption, since the compaction system has to run continuously in order to be effective. The Revopak was in continuous production until 1990, when SD went out of business, although the French built unit is still manufactured by SEMAT. Waste collection vehicles