Allegheny County is home to country's first electric street sweeper

Residents of Homestead, Munhall, Duquesne and 16 other municipalities can expect an oft-overlooked public service to roll through their neighborhoods more quietly this summer.

In May, the Steel Rivers Council of Governments received its new Elgin 100% Electric Broom Bear Street Sweeper, replacing one of the two 2006 diesel models that previously made up its fleet. An Allegheny County Clean Air Fund grant paid for the $748,000 vehicle.

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Steel Rivers Executive Director An Lewis and project leader Gary Hitchins call it the first electric street sweeper to hit the streets in the United States.

The title comes with the addendum that it was not the first one manufactured. The vehicle’s creator, Elgin, had been showing a demo unit off to cities across the nation throughout 2023. Steel Rivers placed their order in January 2024.

“As far as I know, they were marketing and selling them, they just hadn’t gotten an order yet,” Hitchins says.

The application process included a “diesel emissions quantifier” — a calculation of the electric machine’s emissions based on miles driven, fuel consumed and vehicle details through a digital Environmental Protection Agency tool.

“Most of the emissions were, for a given year, a little less than half a ton … for each individual emission,” Hitchen says. “The big one is carbon dioxide — it saves 19.2 metric tons of carbon dioxide from going into the atmosphere.”

That’s equivalent to the amount of emissions 2.6 average American homes produce in a year, according to the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator.

In short, the Clean Air Fund supports regional projects that improve air quality, eliminate pollution or educate residents on the effects of poor air quality.

Enforcement money collected by the Allegheny County Health Department — like the $918,000 penalty leveled at U.S. Steel for uncontrolled coke pushes on Friday, June 6 — fully finances the grants, although that money often takes many years before it lands in the fund account.

Ian Anderson, an environmental health administrator with the county, says there is currently between $9 million and $10 million in the fund — with $5 million already promised to in-progress projects.

Clean Air Fund applications vary year over year, Anderson says. This year, it received 60 applications that totaled $30 million in project requests. In 2024, the fund had received no applications by the week before its mid-September deadline, according to reporting by WESA, but ended up funding four projects throughout the region.

In order to comply with the county’s goal of seeing Clean Air Fund projects reduce emissions, a clause written into the grant agreement required the destruction of the street sweeper that the electric vehicle replaced to ensure an emissions reduction in the county airshed.

Steel Rivers applied in 2023 and was one of seven grant awardees which, in total, received $2.3 million. But to Lewis, emissions savings weren’t the standout feature of their project.

“Above and beyond the numbers, part of why ours was a competitive application is because it’s a regional program,” she says.

Since the region is home to so many small municipalities, Councils of Governments, or COGs, are formed to offer shared services — like street sweeping.

Lewis says Steel Rivers’ sweeping program, which has been in place longer than her 23-year tenure, serves 19 municipalities, most of them being south of the city. The COG also has independent contracts, sending its sweepers as far north as Crescent Township.

While street sweeping does improve curb appeal (literally), its more critical purpose is to remove garbage, silt and leftover rock salt solids from the road before they reach the storm drain systems.

“Pittsburgh … has sufficient rain to put the whole sewer system over capacity,” Lewis says.

If garbage was allowed to collect in the storm drains, she continues, “those outflows that go into streams and rivers flip open, and then you have all this stuff including raw sewage [in the waterways].”

But Steel Rivers’ neighbors in southern Homestead receive a more immediate — and visible — boon: more electric vehicle charging infrastructure. Its rear lot at East 17th and Maple streets is now host to four EV charging stations, one of which will frequently be used by the new sweeper.

They now have what’s known as level two chargers, Hitchins says, meaning they produce anywhere from three to 19.2 kilowatt hours and could charge the new sweeper to capacity in 18-20 hours. Level one is a common household outlet, which would take about three weeks to charge the machine. Level three, or “DC Fast Chargers” produce 50 to 350 kilowatt hours. In a pinch, drivers could get a full charge from a level three in about three hours. Some Homestead businesses are equipped with level three chargers.

To Lewis, the general lack of charging infrastructure is a major reason other municipalities are slow to electrify their fleets.

“What we were told and what we also tried to convey in our grant request is … this is a demonstration project, in a way, for our local governments to help them see that it really is a viable alternative,” she says. “Yes, [while] we still have a longer way to go to build the infrastructure, it can work.”

According to the county health department’s Anderson, the trend is already picking up: Nearby Swissvale is also getting an electric street sweeper in addition to electric garbage trucks, which he predicts will more actively reduce emissions since garbage trucks run more frequently.

Hitchins says that widespread charging infrastructure is a waiting game — just as changes in vehicle fueling have been in the past. Thirty years ago, he recalls, his father was turned off by the idea of a diesel pickup truck because not every gas station had diesel.

“Well, today you go to any one of them and 80% of them have diesel fuel, but when he was growing up in the ’60s and ’70s, there might be two every 40 miles,” Hitchins says. “It’s just a matter of moving on and adopting. The infrastructure’s going to be there.”

Roman wants to hear the stories created in Pittsburgh. When not reporting, he plays difficult video games that make him upset and attempts to make delicious meals out of mismatched leftovers. Contact him at roman@nextpittsburgh.com.