Just before 8 a.m., in Roxborough.

Daniel Simmons Jr. is preparing to leave the Sanitation Division’s Northwest Transfer Station. He has his dream job; the same job his father had before him.

“I love it,” says Simmons. “I wanted this job since I was kid.”

Simmons drives a garbage truck.

“Where else you going to go, to just drive a truck all day and have fun? The hard part was throwing in the beginning, to get to the driving part.”

He works with Domain Williams and Jason McNeil, who toss the garbage bags. Both wear long sleeves to keep the trash juice off their skin when they hurl leaky bags into the back of the truck.

The crew usually gets started on a route right around 7 a.m., but they’re starting late today – a reporter is slowing them down. Sanitation pick-up crews like to get going early before the trash has time to stew for long in the summer sun. It’s not just the smell: Hot bags are weaker bags, more likely to rip open and spill their festering contents across the asphalt.

Like Simmons, Williams likes his job. At least, most of the time. ”As long as the weather is good, we’re good,” he said. “And if it’s not good, we fight through it. Our goal is to get the trash out.”

Today, the weather’s good. It’s cool for August, with a high of 77 degrees.

The city’s larger trucks, like the one Simmons drives, make two trips in a day, filling up with 7.5 tons of trash each time. Across the city, sanitation crews will pick up 2,142 tons of trash today, and 358 tons of recycling.

Williams and McNeil look like the kind of guys who lift the equivalent of five Volkswagen Beetles a day, one garbage can at a time. “Good exercise, good cardio,” Williams says as he tosses another bag into the back of Truck No. 165085, then pulls down a level to run the hopper, crushing the bag, which will soon be joined by hundreds more.

About 300 tons of trash picked up by this crew and others will go to the Northwest Transfer Station, dumped into an immense trench half a football field long. From there, tractor-trailers called packer trucks will back up next to the lengthy ditch to be filled with trash by massive cranes, like a filthy version of a boardwalk arcade game – only this crane manages to hold onto the four to six tons of trash it grabs in a single go.

It’s oddly mesmerizing to watch the enormous claw grab bags of junk, old couches, and rusted hunks of metal, effortlessly pull them up from the pile, and drop them all into the press. Each trailer can hold about 19 tons, which are hauled to waste-energy plants outside the city to be converted into fuel and burned to produce electricity. Today, 806.65 tons of the city’s garbage were disposed of this way, a normal amount for a weekday.

“It never stops,” says James Bryant, who mans the crane. “This is all day. The first two trucks in, they start at 5 o’clock. When they get loaded, they go back out, get some more trash, take it back out, and then go back.”

After six years on the job, Bryant says, he’s gotten used to the smell.