IFAT Munich 2026: JAC electric trucks and an autonomous sweeper on the Grădinariu stand
IFAT Munich is the world's largest trade fair for water, sewage, waste and raw materials technologies. The 2026 edition, the fair's 60th anniversary, took place from 4 to 7 May in a new four-day format, under the tagline "Solutions for Water, Recycling and Circularity".
For Grădinariu, IFAT is a natural fit: for more than 30 years we have been building and delivering sanitation equipment, and sanitation is where electric drive makes the most sense.
What we exhibited
We came to Munich with two themes:
- the JAC electric range, the chassis on which we build refuse collectors, tippers, tankers and the other bodies for municipal services;
- an autonomous street sweeper, the WeRide Robosweeper S2, which cleans pedestrian areas, parks and campuses without a driver.
Why electric in sanitation
A refuse collector works exactly where noise and emissions bother people most: on residential streets, early in the morning, stopping every few dozen metres. That is the ideal profile for an electric truck. Routes are fixed and short, the vehicle returns to base every evening to charge, and frequent braking recovers energy.
Add to this the increasingly strict clean vehicle requirements in public procurement. For a city hall or a sanitation operator, an electric chassis bodied and type-approved locally is no longer an experiment but a bidding option.
Autonomy, the next step
The autonomous sweeper drew the most curious visitors to the stand. It does not replace sanitation crews; it takes over repetitive work in delimited spaces, at hours when people would not be working anyway. It is a direction we follow closely, together with the cameras and sensors that can turn a municipal vehicle into a source of data for the city.
What we take away from IFAT
Interest in electric municipal vehicles now comes from small towns too, not just capitals. The questions have moved from "does it work?" to "what does it cost per kilometre?" and "who maintains it?". To the second we have a simple answer: sales, bodywork, type approval and service are all with us, under one roof.
