Dumpster
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dumpster is an American brand of trash receptacle, and a type of mobile garbage bin or MGB. The term dumpster is also common in Australia although Dumpster is not an established brand there. In British and Australian English, the terms wheelie bin or skip are more commonly used (although they are not perfect synonyms). In some other countries the more descriptive term frontloader container is often used, either in one or two words.
Many businesses, apartment buildings, offices, and industrial sites will have one or multiple dumpsters to store the waste that they generate. Dumpsters are emptied by front-loading garbage trucks. These trucks have large prongs on the front which are aligned and inserted into arms (or slots) on the dumpster. Hydraulics then lift the prongs and the dumpster, eventually flipping the Dumpster upside-down and emptying its contents into the truck's hopper (storage compartment).
The word Dumpster came from the Dempster-Dumpster system of mechanically loading the contents of standardised containers onto garbage trucks, which was patented by Dempster Brothers in the 1930s. The containers were called Dumpsters, a portmanteau of the company's name with the word dump. However, it took the Dempster Dumpmaster, the first successful front-loading garbage truck (and which used this system), to popularise the word. The word dumpster has at least two trademarks associated with it (USPTO registration numbers 0743745 and 0785783), but today it is often used as a generic word.
[edit] Dumpster in popular culture
An episode of The Simpsons ("The Otto Show") parodies the genericized trademark issue when Bart Simpson finds school bus driver Otto homeless:[1]
- Bart: Otto-Man? You're living in a Dumpster?
- Otto: Ho, man, I wish. Dumpster-brand trash bins are top-of-the-line. This is just a Trash-Co waste disposal unit.
