Dive Brief:

• An instructor will train 450 employees at the Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, NY -- the training site for the City of New York Department of Sanitation (DSNY).
• The new workers will learn the ropes of the sanitation industry in a process similar to what cadets at a police academy would go through. The course lasts four weeks and covers everything from driving a truck, to a daily stretching routine, to protecting against hazards such as syringes discarded in trash bags.
• The modern training sessions now include environmental practices such as the collection of paper and food waste in addition to separating plastics. 

Dive Insight:

Positions in the Sanitation Department are in high demand. In order to find the recent class of workers, the department pulled candidate from a pool of 30,000 civil service exams taken since 2007.

The wait list to even take the civil service exam exceeds 25,000. A spokesperson for the department said that a new test is scheduled for the fall of 2014. The sanitation force currently has 6,000 employees, including those currently in training.