Most people don’t give much thought to their waste management. But if they did, they would likely realize how much they’re overspending on waste - and how much it’s costing them in lost time.
Five Ways Your Waste Hauler is Ripping You Off
Why should I care about waste and recycling expenses?
On top of everything else you’re doing, why bother looking at your waste expenses?
Because 90% of companies in the US are overspending on their waste and recycling expenses and you’re likely one of them.
You should care about your waste expenses because they’re costing you in three ways:
Cutting into profits
Stealing your time
Taking advantage of your industry knowledge gaps.
Not looking into your waste management process is costly. Can you afford not to get a free audit?
Unexamined waste expenses cut into profits
If you spend more than $10,000 annually on waste, there’s a good chance you’re sitting on savings.
There are so many ways that your waste disposal is designed to entrap you. But for now, let’s just focus on the biggest one: your waste and recycling contracts. These contracts make you overpay because they don’t limit or eradicate price spikes, ancillary fees, or poor service issues.
Price spikes will happen at least once a year, and if they’re not regulated or eliminated, they’ll just keep on happening. Year after year, these spikes compound until you’re paying an outrageous amount for something that, let’s face it, really should be simple: taking your waste to the dump.
Ancillary fees can compound over time, too. Paying a $40 fuel fee every month may not seem like that much. But over 5 years (the typical term of a trash disposal service agreement), that’s $2400 you could have saved.
But fuel isn’t the only ancillary fee you may see on your invoice. You can get charged for having too much weight in your dumpsters, or too little. You can get charged to cover services in other regions, or charged for not getting paperless bills. And most people will just pay these fees. But you don’t have to!
Not having provisions for bad service can also be expensive. Suppose you have a hauler who just can’t seem to remember to make a site visit on Wednesdays. Or, suppose you have a hauler who leaves a mess every time he services your compactor.
If your contract doesn’t provide recourse for service issues, you can easily get trapped into employing a less than satisfactory hauler. And if it doesn’t regulate price hikes, you’ll be paying far more than you want for severely disappointing service.
Waste services are designed to be exorbitant. And most people don’t realize they can and should question the way their contracts are set up.
Unexamined waste problems steal your time
Who loves spending forty-five minutes on hold waiting to yell at your hauler? Spoiler alert - absolutely no one. You and your staff shouldn’t have to babysit your hauler to ensure that he’s going to do what he’s contractually obligated to do.
Time is one of you and your staff’s greatest resources. If you spend a lot of it constantly course correcting your hauler, you can’t spend it on attending to other more pressing responsibilities.
Unexamined waste processes unfairly take advantage of your industry knowledge gaps.
Most of the waste industry can get away with what it does because clients just don’t know any better. Businesses think they have to pay ancillary fees and that it’s normal to have tons of hauler issues.
The waste industry - and the haulers especially - don’t always treat their customers like people. A lot of them have pretty shady ways of operating. They may ask you to sign contracts that are in their favor; paying the prices they want for the services they decide you should have.
This isn’t okay. And it’s not fair to you, the people with whom they do business.
