compactor

thumb|Soil compactor A compactor is a machine or mechanism used to reduce the size of material such as waste material or biomass through compaction. A trash compactor is used in business and public places like hospitals (and in the United States also in homes) to reduce the volume of trash they produce. A baler-wrapper compactor is used for making compact and wrapped bales in order to improve logistics.

Normally powered by hydraulics, compactors take many shapes and sizes. In landfill sites for example, a large tractor (typically a converted front end loader with some variant of a bulldozer blade attached) with spiked steel wheels called a landfill compactor is used to drive over waste deposited by waste collection vehicles (WCVs).