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Elementary occupations · code 9611

Garbage and recycling collectors

Garbage collectors collect and remove rubbish and items for recycling from buildings, yards, streets and other places. Tasks include - (a) collecting rubbish and recyclable materials and locating them into bins and garbage and recycling trucks; (b) riding on or in garbage and recycling trucks; (c) lifting garbage bins and emptying contents into trucks and larger containers; (d) unloading garbage and recycling trucks. Examples of the occupations classified here: - Dustman/woman - Recycling collector - Refuse collector Some related occupations classified elsewhere: - Garbage truck driver - 8332 - Waste picker - 9612

None of this job's tasks scored high enough to count. It ranks 7 of 427 for holding up against AI.

Also known as

  • refuse collector

Job titles from the EU's ESCO list. Search for any of them on the jobs page and you'll end up here.

90.8
Holds up
against AI Not Exposed

AI could take on 9.2 of 100, on average
so it holds up at 100 − 9.2 = 90.8

That's the whole sum, and you can check it against the ILO's study.

64.3
How hands-on
out of 100

From O*NET, averaged across 3 US jobs

29
How fiddly
and cramped

finger skill 31.2 · hand skill 35.2 · cramped spaces 20.5 · averaged

Kind of hands-on work · hands-on 50+ · fiddly under 39.4 Hands-on, less fiddly work

Less fine handwork and fewer cramped spaces than a typical hands-on job. That clears one hurdle for machines. It doesn't mean machines are doing this work yet.

estimated O*NET 31.0 BLS occupational crosswalk chain ISCO-08 to 2010 SOC (Aug 2012, rev. Jun 2015); 2010 to 2018 SOC (Nov 2017); O*NET-SOC 2019 taxonomy data 0.7-work-setting measures chosen by Frey & Osborne (2017) · the grouping is a sorting, not a measurement

This number is probably too high

This score only looks at AI tools like chatbots. It doesn't look at robots at all — and this job rates 64.3 out of 100 for how hands-on it is, which is exactly where robots come in.

Have a look at the tasks below and judge for yourself. The ILO scored them low because a chatbot can't do them. Whether a machine with hands could is a different question, and we can't answer it yet.

The tasks behind the score

The score is the average of these. A job is really a bundle of tasks, and an average can hide how uneven that bundle is.

The task AI could do most of scores 11.3, while the average is 9.2. A big gap means some of this job is wide open to AI and some of it barely at all. That's quite different from a job where everything sits somewhere in the middle, even when the averages match.

  1. 11.3

    Riding on or in garbage and recycling trucks

    Very Low
  2. 10

    Lifting garbage bins and emptying contents into trucks and larger containers

    Very Low
  3. 8

    Unloading garbage and recycling trucks.

    Very Low
  4. 7.5

    Collecting rubbish and recyclable materials and locating it into bins and garbage and recycling trucks

    Very Low

4 tasks · the High to Very Low labels are the ILO's

from the source Working Paper 140, Generative AI and Jobs 2025 index data 0.7-work-setting

Helped, or replaced?

The score above can't tell a tool that makes you faster from one that does the task instead of you. Jobs and Skills Australia looked at those two things separately, and this is their result, matched to this job.

One Australian job matches this one closely, so this is about as reliable as it gets here.

AI helps you
32
AI does it for you
17

Helping wins by 15 points.

estimated Our Gen AI Transition (Gen AI Capacity Study) September 2025 detailed data release data 0.7-work-setting matched to Australian jobs 8996

Compared with similar jobs

There are 33 jobs in the “Elementary occupations” group, averaging 84.8. This one is above that.