Family fulfilling father’s dream of electric garbage fleet

Some dreams are powered by electricity. And with the right outlet, those dreams can come true.

That’s definitely the case for Kuna-based J&M Sanitation, Inc. , which is the first in the state to run a fleet of electric vehicles to pick up trash and recyclables. Though it’s a reality now, it took a few decades to realize the dream.

Timothy and Belinda Gordon bought J&M Sanitation 38 years ago, serving the communities of Kuna and Melba and some unincorporated areas of Canyon County. It was a family business from the very start.

“Whenever we had days off, dad would put us on the back of the truck and we started throwing trash,” said Chad Gordon, Timothy and Belinda’s son and the general manager of the business. “And my youngest brother was still daycare age, so he’d ride in the truck with my dad all day in the car seat. It’s been definitely a family business since day one.”

Though his parents have been semi-retired for about 20 years, Gordon’s father has had a dream of an all-electric fleet for several years.

“Dad has been wanting to do this for a very long time, and I was a little leery in all these years. We never bought a brand-new truck. We always bought used stuff and refurbished it,” Gordon said.

“This was a pretty big undertaking to go out and purchase one brand-new truck, let alone brand-new trucks that were double the price of a traditional diesel truck.”

Timothy is a U.S. Navy veteran and served in the Vietnam War. Having seen the impacts of war, he wanted to do something using technology that would help the U.S. be more independent when it comes to things like oil consumption.

“The waste industry is a dirty industry overall because it’s trash and you’re using diesel trucks,” Gordon said. “It’s something that the waste industry is always looking at. What’s the next environmental thing that we can do to make our process a little bit greener.”

Gordon pointed out that since Idaho Power uses wind and solar farms among other sources to produce energy, the electricity that’s used to fuel J&M’s vehicles can truly be considered “green.”

J&M began the search in earnest about seven years ago, trying to find a company that was building electric chassis for garbage trucks. Nobody was diving into the EV market, it seemed, until the Gordons connected with a company at a waste expo.

BYD, or Build Your Dreams, a Chinese company with North American headquarters in Lancaster, California, said they could build a garbage truck for J&M, having had a background in manufacturing EV busses. The company began operations in the U.S. in 2013 with just six employees. It now has more than 1,000 employees, with 750 of those in the Lancaster operation. It has built more than 65,000 busses in that time.

Gordon said they decided to move forward with the build but keeping the goal small to begin with.

“We said, ‘OK, let’s move forward,’” he said. “At the beginning, I was like, ‘Let’s just do one because I’m not sure how well this is going to work, and we’re going to spend a lot of money to do it.’”

It was through that educational process that Gordon said he learned about the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality’s “Volkswagen” funds or Vehicle Replacement Program.

The DEQ’s VRP is made up of funds from the settlement with automaker Volkswagen that alleged the company installed devices in diesel engines to give false emission test readings and from Environmental Protection Agency Diesel Emission Reduction Act grant funding.

Future VRP funding will be available through the department, however a date for the next round has not been determined yet. Those interested in being notified of future funding cycles can sign up for notifications at https://www.deq.idaho.gov/air-quality/improving-air-quality/volkswagen-and-diesel-funding/ .

According to G. Michael Brown, environmental resources discipline lead with the DEQ, “J&M Sanitation rebates for three all electric vehicles and charging infrastructure totals just over $849,000 based on total project costs just over $2 million,” and was funded through the VW settlement funds.

Through the application process, J&M asked for funding for up to three trucks. The DEQ had funding equal to 45% of the project cost and J&M took 41.9%.

“There were some points there that, if you took less funding, they gave you a couple more points,” Gordon said. “Once we got that, then it made me feel a lot more comfortable with making the purchase of a couple trucks to see if they would work versus just the one.”

The order was placed and the trucks were delivered in 2021.

Because of where the batteries which power the trucks are placed, the vehicles are side-loading rather than front-loading. Gordon said BYD is still working on being able to design a front-loading version of the trucks. That means the trucks in J&M’s fleet can only pick up residential trash and recyclables.

When Gordon and his siblings were coming up in the business, the traditional trucks required crews of two people: One to drive the trucks and another to make sure the receptacles were getting tossed into the back of the truck. With the EV trucks and the side-loading arm, only one person needs to drive the truck and operate the pick-up work from the cab.

On a full charge, the trucks can service between 700 and 800 homes, doing between 1,000 to 1,400 lifts of the collector arm and driving around 36 miles per day. The trucks collect around two to three loads a day each at 10 tons per load. At the end of a shift, the trucks still have between 20 and 40% battery life left.

Some waste management companies have started using trucks powered by compressed natural gas, which is something Gordon said they researched. However, the cost to set up the infrastructure for EVs was $180,000 ? pouring walkways, running conduit, installing panels and shed to house them ? compared to $4 million for compressed natural gas. The infrastructure also includes the ability for J&M to increase their electric fleet up to 20 trucks.

Costs for EV are also more affordable in terms of fueling and maintenance, Gordon pointed out, than traditional diesel trucks. It costs about $25 per day to charge the trucks compared to the $180 per day he spends to fuel the diesels remaining in his fleet. Those lower costs are also passed on to customers.

Since the first two trucks have worked out so well for J&M, two more were ordered and delivered at the beginning of this summer. However, compared to the original two trucks which have 295 kilowatts of batter capacity, the new trucks have 405 kilowatts of capacity, which allows the company to use the trucks on outlying routes.

Gordon said believes the addition of the new vehicles make Kuna the first city to have its trash and recycling collected entirely by EVs.

“All of the residential trash and recycling within the city limits of Kuna is collected by electric vehicles, which makes us the first city in the United States, if not possibly the whole world from what I’ve been able to find,” he said.

The same year that J&M started using EV garbage trucks, Republic Services of Idaho started using EV trucks for its recycling customers, however only in Boise. The company has nine EV trucks, entirely based in Boise, servicing 80,000 customers, one third of the population.

“The majority of our EV trucks service residential recycling customers, while a couple service commercial recycling,” said Cord Stanley, general manager of Republic Services of Idaho. “The residential customers are every other week, and commercial customers are usually weekly.”

Though the nine EV trucks are exclusively used in Boise, Republic has another 175 compressed natural gas-fueled trucks that operate in Boise, Meridian, Garden City, Star, Nampa, Middleton and Caldwell.

Though the infrastructure exists for J&M to expand to more trucks, Gordon said the company focuses on growing sustainably and taking care of its customers.

“That’s the one thing I never wanted to do was grow so quick that [we] lose sight of some of that customer service,” he said. “At the end of the day, we are a service industry.”

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