A dumpster awaiting pick-up

A dumpster is a large trash receptacle, and a type of mobile garbage bin or MGB.

Many businesses, apartment buildings, offices, and industrial sites will have one or multiple dumpsters to store the waste that they generate. Dumpsters are emptied by front loading garbage trucks. These trucks have large prongs on the front which are aligned and inserted into arms (or slots) on the dumpster. Hydraulics then lift the prongs and the dumpster, eventually flipping the dumpster upside-down and emptying its contents into the truck's hopper (storage compartment).

The word dumpster came from the Dempster-Dumpster system of mechanically loading the contents of standardised containers onto garbage trucks, which was patented by the Dempster Brothers Incorporated in the 1930s. The containers were called Dumpsters, a portmanteau of the company's name with the word dump. However it took the Dempster Dumpmaster, the first successful front loading garbage truck (and which used this system), to popularise the word. The word is a trademark[1] of the Krug International Corporation, but today it is often used as a generic word.

See also: Dumpster diving, skip