Profile: Sheray McKinney
Sheray McKinney can make your biggest problems disappear. That old refrigerator. Bags and bags of yard waste. A broken water heater. An old tree stump. You kick it to the curb and Sheray carts it away.
As a senior refuse driver for Houston's Solid Waste Management Department, McKinney is part of a corps of 500 city workers that ensure Houston doesn't choke on the 2,500 tons of solid waste it produces every day.
McKinney and her colleagues drive 800,000 tons of steaming garbage per year in massive semis — many of them without air conditioning — to their final resting place: BFI's Blue Ridge Landfill 20 miles south of Downtown Houston.
McKinney expertly twists her 18-wheel rig between garbage trucks, dump trucks, payloaders and bulldozers up a 59-foot mountain of trash. She shouts, "all clear" and releases a shower of debris onto the 530-acre trash mountain. Sometimes, after a shift, she and other drivers scrape maggots and garbage from their clothes before they go home. She makes a little over $10 per hour.
“Most people don’t think much about it when they turn on a faucet, or flush a toilet or take their garbage to the curb," says McKinney. “What they don’t know is that hard-working, creative, dedicated people are working behind the scenes in rough conditions for very little money so we all can live in a civilized society.”