In this paper we have proposed two heuristics for the one-dimensional bin-packing problem. One is a hybrid steady-state grouping genetic algorithm, whereas the other is an improved version of Perturbation MBS’ heuristic (Fleszar and Hindi in Comput Oper Res 29:821–839, 2002). A combined approach using these two heuristics gives results which are comparable with the best methods known so far.