inbound

Women have long been underrepresented in the trucking industry— accounting for just 6 percent of the commercial truck driver workforce, according to government statistics—but a high school in California is doing its bit to change that. Patterson High School, located about 90 miles east of San Francisco, is actively working to promote trucking to a younger audience, with a special emphasis on inspiring the next generation of female drivers. As part of that push, the school opened a truck-driving program for its students and the general community in February.

Those efforts are starting to pay off. Two young women, Leilani and Cheyenne, have already expressed interest in a career in trucking. As a senior, Leilani is currently enrolled in the high school trucking program, while Cheyenne, a junior, is enrolled in the school’s supply chain and logistics management class and will join the trucking program next year.

“It takes great courage and grit to choose to be the first at anything, and I have utmost respect for Leilani [for choosing] to pursue a career in this male-dominated industry, and I will do everything I can to support her,” Dave Dein, the school’s commercial driver’s license (CDL) coordinator and instructor, told the Patterson Irrigator, a local newspaper. Dein has already made good on that promise. This fall, he organized a successful GoFundMe campaign to raise money to send the two young women to this month’s Women In Trucking conference.

School steers girls toward
careers in trucking
Eastbound and Down, redux

When movie star Burt Reynolds died in September at age 82, the mustachioed former stuntman left behind a body of work that reportedly inspired many fans to seek careers as truck drivers. A prime example was the 1977 movie “Smokey and the Bandit,” which featured Reynolds and co-star Sally Field in a tale about a trucker and his buddy who were hired to smuggle an 18-wheeler full of Coors beer from Texas to Georgia, with inept police in hot pursuit.

Now, 41 years after the film’s release, truckers still remember Reynolds as an actor who brought humor and glamour to a blue-collar profession. On Sept. 29, the industry group Truckers.com (formerly known as the “Small Business in Transportation Coalition”) held a memorial celebration for him—free to commercial driver’s license (CDL) holders and their families—that included a country music concert.

The centerpiece of the event was a truck convoy that duplicated the movie’s fictional dash from Texarkana, Texas, to Atlanta, complete with replicas of the film’s Pontiac Trans-Am sports car and ’70s-era state police cruisers. The convoy reached its Georgia destination on Sept. 30, with one significant change from the film—all drivers stayed in compliance with federal hours-of-service (HOS) regulations as required in this age of electronic logging devices (ELDs), the event’s organizers said.

A lift truck manufacturing plant may not strike anyone as a paragon of sustainability—unless, that is, the plant is run by New Bremen, Ohio-based lift truck maker Crown Equipment Corp. In October, Crown added a sixth location to its roster of facilities that have achieved zero-landfill status.

Employees at the company’s Troy, Ohio, manufacturing plant led the effort to evaluate the facility’s operations for waste-reduction opportunities beginning in 2017, according to Crown. They soon found ways to recycle or reuse a range of waste products, including coolants, used oils, aerosol cans, paint waste, disposable towels, cardboard, and wood pallets. Any remaining waste not reused or recycled is sent to a waste-to-energy facility. In total, Crown expects to divert more than 6,000 pounds of the facility’s waste from landfills each year.

Crown credits both its employees and the local community for its success. “An important factor of the Troy facility achievement was our manufacturing neighbors and recycling partners, who have worked closely with us to help us reach our goal,” Tonja Rammel, Crown’s environmental health and safety manager, said in a release. “With this achievement, we will now embark on achieving ISO 14001 certification.”