The days of hearing the waste collection truck rolling down the road and rushing to put out your bins are numbered.

On Tuesday, Emterra, Mack Trucks, the City of Courtenay and the Town of Comox unveiled their new fleet of fully-electric waste collection trucks.

The new Mack LR Electric trucks make up the largest fleet of its kind in North America. The three trucks at the unveiling event in Comox were seen on the streets as early as Wednesday, with the next batch of trucks will be deployed in coming weeks. The trucks are specifically designed for waste management. According to a release from Emterra, they "offer several advantages over diesel trucks, such as zero emissions and lower noise levels."

The trucks are indeed much quieter than their diesel alternatives. After air brakes are let off they begin rolling without any noise. They use a 376 kWh battery (by comparison, a 2024 Hyundai Ioniq 5 has a battery capacity of 84 kWh), giving them 113 km of range. With the high capacity charging stations at the Emterra facility, the trucks can be fully charged within 90 minutes. The trucks also have three regenerative braking modes: high, low and automatic.

"Low is when you have an empty body, with no trash in the vehicle," said George Fotopolous from Mack Trucks. "Once you have some weight in the body itself and you put on high and then you don't feel that that (jerking) motion forward."

The automatic feature gives the vehicle the ability to coast when it is on highways or faster roads.

"The auto is only engaging re-gen when you step on the brake," he said.

Paulina Leung, chief sustainability officer at Emterra, said that the cost of charging the trucks would be a "small, small fraction of diesel."

"You've got to be willing to put up that upfront cost," she said. "These are moving houses. It takes a customer who is willing to do this. If a customer just wants the standard metrics of what they're looking for when they're doing procurement, this will never happen."

Courtenay Mayor Bob Wells said that the city, as well as the Town of Comox, has existing contracts with Emterra. With Emterra being the ones to actually purchase the trucks, he said it meant that the taxpayers in Courtenay won't be feeling the cost of the trucks.

"We just said that we would do whatever we could to support their vision," Wells said. "We had a 10-year contract with them, and when it got renewed 鈥� because it had been such a long time with costs rising like crazy, that was actually the biggest impact to our solid waste collection."

To mitigate the draw to the grid and to Emterra's own operation, the trucks will be charged overnight. The charging facility will include six 150-kW chargers that are mounted to a metal skid, giving Emterra the ability to do maintenance and upgrades without demolishing a concrete base, which many similar electric vehicle chargers use. The set up also makes them ready for future technologies like hydrogen batteries and other technology that is in development.