Five Ways Your Waste Hauler is Ripping You Off
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.
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.
The waste industry is designed to trap you into paying way too much for terrible services.
They don’t want you to know the ins and outs of your contract. They don’t want you to start asking uncomfortable questions about how exactly they get away with charging what they charge.
Because if you did, you might see their tactics for what they are - indifferent at best and outright dishonest at worst.
The waste industry is unfair to you, their clients, in five ways. Most haulers would love for you to believe that you have to accept:
Price hikes
Ancillary fees
Awful Contract Terms
Automatic Renewal of Your Contract
Terrible Service
And its just not true! There are options when it comes to your waste management. You rarely have to accept your contract as written. In fact, there’s specific language you can put in your contract to prevent or limit all of the examples above.
Learn more about your top 5 hidden waste problems here!!
Unfair Price Hikes Happen with No Warning
It isn’t fair to be on the receiving end of surprise price hikes. You should be notified ahead of time - and what you’re charged shouldn’t be exorbitant.
Most waste haulers don’t warn you prior to an increase in fees. There are some exceptions - if disposal sites mandate an increase in fees, a hauler may let you know. Unfortunately, this isn’t typical industry practice.
This in itself is a pretty shady business practice. What would happen if your Hulu or Netflix subscription increased by $50 a month overnight? This is exactly what haulers do on a regular basis.
A hauler can increase their rates as much as four times a year and up to ten percent each time.
This means if you’re paying a $1000 a month for waste disposal, you could be paying up to $1400 a month by the end of the year.
Price hikes can make it nearly impossible to budget for waste expenses. By proactively limiting them in your contract, you’ll be able to plan for future costs with accuracy - while saving capital.
Haulers Let You Think You Have to Pay All Ancillary Waste Fees
The waste industry is designed to pass on as much of their operating cost to you as possible. Most haulers, unfortunately, are going to charge you and any other companies on their route as much as they can. Ancillary fees are one of the main ways haulers do this.
There are dozens of waste fees, but you’re most likely to be charged for fuel or environmental fees. They’ll be listed on your invoice and will look like this:
Most people don’t realize they can limit these waste fees. Before you sign a contract, make sure it has a clause that caps these fees to a certain percentage. You aren’t going to have a lot of luck changing your contract mid-term - haulers just don’t have the incentive to do something they know will cost them.
It’s not fair for haulers to use what you don’t know against you. You shouldn’t have to pay a fee if you don’t have to.
Most haulers know that their clients aren’t going to question what they’re paying and why they’re paying it - they’re just going to do it.
But there’s no reason for you to be part of the 95% of companies out there who are overpaying.
Don’t patently accept your ancillary fees. Prevent or cap them in your contract and you’ll could save hundreds or even thousands over the long run.
Contract Terms Are Designed to Trap You
How difficult it is for you to get out of your contract? It’s probably more difficult than you think.
Most haulers require that you send a certified letter within a very specific time frame prior to the end of your contract. Most contracts require that you give 90-180 days notice if the standard clause is intact.
If you send it too early, it’s null. If you send it too late, you’re out of luck. And heaven forbid you email them - you have to take the time to take it to the post office.
On top of that, you’ll have an termination fee. Most of the time this termination fee is the average of the most recent 6 invoices X 6. So if you pay $1000 a month, you’ll owe your hauler $6000. This may sound like a lot but for many companies, this is actually the less expensive option in the long run.
You need to make sure your contract is relatively simple to terminate. (If you already have signed a contract, make a note of when your contract ends and what you’ll have to do to end it - and read the next section carefully!)
Bad Waste Hauler Contracts Automatically Renew
Most contracts will automatically renew. If you don’t give notice within a narrow window of time, you will be stuck a new contract you didn’t want!
Suppose your hauler keeps missing pick-ups, and you’ve realized you’re nearing the end of your contract and you want to terminate. You give your hauler rep a call to let them know, but they tell you - surprise! - your contract has already been renewed. There was no notice, no email, no phone call. You now have a new three year contract with a hauler you can’t stand.
No one should have to go through that!
It’s not fair for you to be trapped in a contract if you want to terminate it. This is exactly why we review your contract terms in our thorough waste audits - and every other critical part of your waste and recycling streams!
Haulers Aren’t Going to Protect You Against Their Terrible Services
Haulers don’t often make service provisions a standard part of their contracts. This means that if you want to have recourse when trash keeps getting strewn across your location, you need to shore up your contract.
Make sure that there are clear consequences for missed services, or service that is poorly performed. For example, you may want to add a provision about how quickly they will come if you call for an extra pick-up or a provision for cancelling without penalty if they consisently do not perform.
If there isn’t a consequence; it’s more likely that haulers will be less careful about the way they service your locations.
You Don’t Have to Be Ripped Off By Your Hauler
Haulers are not going to show you how a compactor could save you $80,000 in the next five years.
They’re not going to tell you that you don’t actually need service 5 times a week. They’re not going to tell you that getting a cardboard baler can help you save money by adding a revenue stream. They’re not going to disclose that you can reduce your costs by requesting that each of your five dumpsters at a certain location get picked up at a different frequency.
We will.
Schedule a free, no-obligation consultation today to learn more about your savings opportunities!
Five Ways Your Waste Hauler is Ripping You Off
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.
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.
The waste industry is designed to trap you into paying way too much for terrible services.
They don’t want you to know the ins and outs of your contract. They don’t want you to start asking uncomfortable questions about how exactly they get away with charging what they charge.
Because if you did, you might see their tactics for what they are - indifferent at best and outright dishonest at worst.
The waste industry is unfair to you, their clients, in five ways. Most haulers would love for you to believe that you have to accept:
Price hikes
Ancillary fees
Awful Contract Terms
Automatic Renewal of Your Contract
Terrible Service
And its just not true! There are options when it comes to your waste management. You rarely have to accept your contract as written. In fact, there’s specific language you can put in your contract to prevent or limit all of the examples above.
Learn more about your top 5 hidden waste problems here!!
Unfair Price Hikes Happen with No Warning
It isn’t fair to be on the receiving end of surprise price hikes. You should be notified ahead of time - and what you’re charged shouldn’t be exorbitant.
Most waste haulers don’t warn you prior to an increase in fees. There are some exceptions - if disposal sites mandate an increase in fees, a hauler may let you know. Unfortunately, this isn’t typical industry practice.
This in itself is a pretty shady business practice. What would happen if your Hulu or Netflix subscription increased by $50 a month overnight? This is exactly what haulers do on a regular basis.
A hauler can increase their rates as much as four times a year and up to ten percent each time.
This means if you’re paying a $1000 a month for waste disposal, you could be paying up to $1400 a month by the end of the year.
Price hikes can make it nearly impossible to budget for waste expenses. By proactively limiting them in your contract, you’ll be able to plan for future costs with accuracy - while saving capital.
Haulers Let You Think You Have to Pay All Ancillary Waste Fees
The waste industry is designed to pass on as much of their operating cost to you as possible. Most haulers, unfortunately, are going to charge you and any other companies on their route as much as they can. Ancillary fees are one of the main ways haulers do this.
There are dozens of waste fees, but you’re most likely to be charged for fuel or environmental fees. They’ll be listed on your invoice and will look like this:
Most people don’t realize they can limit these waste fees. Before you sign a contract, make sure it has a clause that caps these fees to a certain percentage. You aren’t going to have a lot of luck changing your contract mid-term - haulers just don’t have the incentive to do something they know will cost them.
It’s not fair for haulers to use what you don’t know against you. You shouldn’t have to pay a fee if you don’t have to.
Most haulers know that their clients aren’t going to question what they’re paying and why they’re paying it - they’re just going to do it.
But there’s no reason for you to be part of the 95% of companies out there who are overpaying.
Don’t patently accept your ancillary fees. Prevent or cap them in your contract and you’ll could save hundreds or even thousands over the long run.
Contract Terms Are Designed to Trap You
How difficult it is for you to get out of your contract? It’s probably more difficult than you think.
Most haulers require that you send a certified letter within a very specific time frame prior to the end of your contract. Most contracts require that you give 90-180 days notice if the standard clause is intact.
If you send it too early, it’s null. If you send it too late, you’re out of luck. And heaven forbid you email them - you have to take the time to take it to the post office.
On top of that, you’ll have an termination fee. Most of the time this termination fee is the average of the most recent 6 invoices X 6. So if you pay $1000 a month, you’ll owe your hauler $6000. This may sound like a lot but for many companies, this is actually the less expensive option in the long run.
You need to make sure your contract is relatively simple to terminate. (If you already have signed a contract, make a note of when your contract ends and what you’ll have to do to end it - and read the next section carefully!)
Bad Waste Hauler Contracts Automatically Renew
Most contracts will automatically renew. If you don’t give notice within a narrow window of time, you will be stuck a new contract you didn’t want!
Suppose your hauler keeps missing pick-ups, and you’ve realized you’re nearing the end of your contract and you want to terminate. You give your hauler rep a call to let them know, but they tell you - surprise! - your contract has already been renewed. There was no notice, no email, no phone call. You now have a new three year contract with a hauler you can’t stand.
No one should have to go through that!
It’s not fair for you to be trapped in a contract if you want to terminate it. This is exactly why we review your contract terms in our thorough waste audits - and every other critical part of your waste and recycling streams!
Haulers Aren’t Going to Protect You Against Their Terrible Services
Haulers don’t often make service provisions a standard part of their contracts. This means that if you want to have recourse when trash keeps getting strewn across your location, you need to shore up your contract.
Make sure that there are clear consequences for missed services, or service that is poorly performed. For example, you may want to add a provision about how quickly they will come if you call for an extra pick-up or a provision for cancelling without penalty if they consisently do not perform.
If there isn’t a consequence; it’s more likely that haulers will be less careful about the way they service your locations.
You Don’t Have to Be Ripped Off By Your Hauler
Haulers are not going to show you how a compactor could save you $80,000 in the next five years.
They’re not going to tell you that you don’t actually need service 5 times a week. They’re not going to tell you that getting a cardboard baler can help you save money by adding a revenue stream. They’re not going to disclose that you can reduce your costs by requesting that each of your five dumpsters at a certain location get picked up at a different frequency.
We will.
Schedule a free, no-obligation consultation today to learn more about your savings opportunities!
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.
Five Ways Your Waste Hauler is Ripping You Off
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.
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.
The waste industry is designed to trap you into paying way too much for terrible services.
They don’t want you to know the ins and outs of your contract. They don’t want you to start asking uncomfortable questions about how exactly they get away with charging what they charge.
Because if you did, you might see their tactics for what they are - indifferent at best and outright dishonest at worst.
The waste industry is unfair to you, their clients, in five ways. Most haulers would love for you to believe that you have to accept:
Price hikes
Ancillary fees
Awful Contract Terms
Automatic Renewal of Your Contract
Terrible Service
And its just not true! There are options when it comes to your waste management. You rarely have to accept your contract as written. In fact, there’s specific language you can put in your contract to prevent or limit all of the examples above.
Learn more about your top 5 hidden waste problems here!!
Unfair Price Hikes Happen with No Warning
It isn’t fair to be on the receiving end of surprise price hikes. You should be notified ahead of time - and what you’re charged shouldn’t be exorbitant.
Most waste haulers don’t warn you prior to an increase in fees. There are some exceptions - if disposal sites mandate an increase in fees, a hauler may let you know. Unfortunately, this isn’t typical industry practice.
This in itself is a pretty shady business practice. What would happen if your Hulu or Netflix subscription increased by $50 a month overnight? This is exactly what haulers do on a regular basis.
A hauler can increase their rates as much as four times a year and up to ten percent each time.
This means if you’re paying a $1000 a month for waste disposal, you could be paying up to $1400 a month by the end of the year.
Price hikes can make it nearly impossible to budget for waste expenses. By proactively limiting them in your contract, you’ll be able to plan for future costs with accuracy - while saving capital.
Haulers Let You Think You Have to Pay All Ancillary Waste Fees
The waste industry is designed to pass on as much of their operating cost to you as possible. Most haulers, unfortunately, are going to charge you and any other companies on their route as much as they can. Ancillary fees are one of the main ways haulers do this.
There are dozens of waste fees, but you’re most likely to be charged for fuel or environmental fees. They’ll be listed on your invoice and will look like this:
Most people don’t realize they can limit these waste fees. Before you sign a contract, make sure it has a clause that caps these fees to a certain percentage. You aren’t going to have a lot of luck changing your contract mid-term - haulers just don’t have the incentive to do something they know will cost them.
It’s not fair for haulers to use what you don’t know against you. You shouldn’t have to pay a fee if you don’t have to.
Most haulers know that their clients aren’t going to question what they’re paying and why they’re paying it - they’re just going to do it.
But there’s no reason for you to be part of the 95% of companies out there who are overpaying.
Don’t patently accept your ancillary fees. Prevent or cap them in your contract and you’ll could save hundreds or even thousands over the long run.
Contract Terms Are Designed to Trap You
How difficult it is for you to get out of your contract? It’s probably more difficult than you think.
Most haulers require that you send a certified letter within a very specific time frame prior to the end of your contract. Most contracts require that you give 90-180 days notice if the standard clause is intact.
If you send it too early, it’s null. If you send it too late, you’re out of luck. And heaven forbid you email them - you have to take the time to take it to the post office.
On top of that, you’ll have an termination fee. Most of the time this termination fee is the average of the most recent 6 invoices X 6. So if you pay $1000 a month, you’ll owe your hauler $6000. This may sound like a lot but for many companies, this is actually the less expensive option in the long run.
You need to make sure your contract is relatively simple to terminate. (If you already have signed a contract, make a note of when your contract ends and what you’ll have to do to end it - and read the next section carefully!)
Bad Waste Hauler Contracts Automatically Renew
Most contracts will automatically renew. If you don’t give notice within a narrow window of time, you will be stuck a new contract you didn’t want!
Suppose your hauler keeps missing pick-ups, and you’ve realized you’re nearing the end of your contract and you want to terminate. You give your hauler rep a call to let them know, but they tell you - surprise! - your contract has already been renewed. There was no notice, no email, no phone call. You now have a new three year contract with a hauler you can’t stand.
No one should have to go through that!
It’s not fair for you to be trapped in a contract if you want to terminate it. This is exactly why we review your contract terms in our thorough waste audits - and every other critical part of your waste and recycling streams!
Haulers Aren’t Going to Protect You Against Their Terrible Services
Haulers don’t often make service provisions a standard part of their contracts. This means that if you want to have recourse when trash keeps getting strewn across your location, you need to shore up your contract.
Make sure that there are clear consequences for missed services, or service that is poorly performed. For example, you may want to add a provision about how quickly they will come if you call for an extra pick-up or a provision for cancelling without penalty if they consisently do not perform.
If there isn’t a consequence; it’s more likely that haulers will be less careful about the way they service your locations.
You Don’t Have to Be Ripped Off By Your Hauler
Haulers are not going to show you how a compactor could save you $80,000 in the next five years.
They’re not going to tell you that you don’t actually need service 5 times a week. They’re not going to tell you that getting a cardboard baler can help you save money by adding a revenue stream. They’re not going to disclose that you can reduce your costs by requesting that each of your five dumpsters at a certain location get picked up at a different frequency.
We will.
Schedule a free, no-obligation consultation today to learn more about your savings opportunities!
3 Reasons Why Solving Waste Issues is a Waste of Your Time
Your time is valuable, so one of the best things you can do is proactively protect it.
Your time is valuable, so one of the best things you can do is proactively protect it.
Solving waste issues is a waste of time because
They don’t actually solve anything
You’re not paid to solve endless loops of waste issues
It steals time from other projects
It’s important to invest in your waste management process. Unless you have solid waste disposal strategies, problems are going to keep coming back.
Let’s learn how to optimize your solution methods is critical - you, your staff and your bottom line will all stand to benefit.
Waste Solutions Aren’t Always Long-Term Fixes
Any solutions that aren’t built into your contract are shaky ones.
We can’t change the fact that oftentimes waste haulers often have lousy customer service. But we make sure our clients have peace of mind by controlling price hikes, limiting ancillary fees, and making service provisions.
If you have bad service, but your contract doesn’t have a service provision clause, you won’t have much recourse when your hauler strews garbage all across your parking lot for the third time this month. You may convince him to come back and clean up his or her mess, but they don’t have much incentive to stop doing it.
If you receive a surprise price hike, it’s unlikely your hauler will listen to your complaints unless you can point to language on your contract that specifically prohibits them.
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And honestly, sometimes what you don’t know is used against you. If you don’t know how the hauler industry works, it can be hard to fight an inaccurate billing error (which, by the way, happen about 10% of the time). It can be difficult to make a case for fair pricing for your company if you don’t really know what’s fair.
Just two months ago, one of our clients’ haulers got a 900% price hike and insisted it was normal. We successfully confronted the hauler because we knew this is not an typical industry price hike. It took quite a few phone calls, but it was a burden the client didn’t have to handle on their own.
Once your contract includes language that protects your interests - and your time - you can use it to show the hauler that they can’t leave trash on the grounds or raise prices when they feel like it.
The devil is in the details - make sure your contract is airtight. And when all else fails, having some insider industry knowledge can really come in handy!
Your Aren’t Paid to Babysit Your Waste Hauler
It can take an extraordinary amount of time to resolve waste issues. You may wait on hold for the better part of an hour, then speak to someone who is cagey about getting quick resolution to the problem - or who may insist that it’s not a problem at all. Then the solution might not work, or may take so long to put in place it’s caused other problems!
You and your staff aren’t paid to solve endless loops of waste issues.
Unless your job description is “Hauler Intermediary” if you’re spending more than an hour or two a month resolving trash issues, you’re spending too much time.
Your Time Should be Your Own
Any time spent babysitting your hauler is time taken away from other projects and priorities. If you weren’t problem solving trash issues, what else could you be doing? Responding to client issues? Evaluating budgets?
Your time shouldn’t be infringed on by poor service issues. You shouldn’t have to constantly be distracted by waste issues - small or large.
Resolving Waste Issues Permanently is Critical
Stop the endless cycle of waste issues! Evaluate and permanently fix your contract so that it becomes a tool in your defense - not something that hurts you.
Insert language that limit your price hikes - this will give you fiscal stability since you’ll be able to predict waste expenses with certainty. Include clauses that limit or drastically reduce fees, and that have clear consequences for consistent poor service.
You can’t stop haulers from being haulers. But you can make sure you have recourse when you and your company aren’t being treated fairly, which will ultimately save you time - and money.
Why Should I Care About Overpaying for Waste Expenses?
You should care about overspending because you’re doing it - and by no small margin.
You should care about overspending because there’s you’re doing it - and by no small margin.
In the seventeen years we’ve been in business, we’ve helped companies save at least 20-40% on their annual waste savings. (Tad Dolbier, for example, is saving $6500 a month on his gross waste spend)
If you’re paying for garbage and recycling disposal, there’s a 95% chance you’re paying too much. Why pay more when you don’t have to?
Waste Hauler Contracts Make You Overpay
Waste expenses aren’t like other business expenses because they - unintentionally or otherwise - are set up to exploit profit centers.
What’s a profit center?
A profit center is something haulers like Waste Management or Republic use to generate revenue. The ancillary fees on your waste hauler contract, for instance, are a huge profit center. These fees are often not actually tied to covering costs - they exist in your invoice because they can.
We regularly limit or completely eradicate these fees for all of our clients.
Any recurring fee will compound over time, so we limit it as much as we can - especially since most waste contract tend to have terms anywhere from 3-5 years! Paying a $40 fuel fee every month may not seem like that much. But over 5 years, that’s $2400 you could have saved - and that’s assuming that the fuel does not increase over those 5 years, which it most certainly will.
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This means that unless you’ve been extraordinarily vigilant - and, in some cases, even if you have - you’re overpaying on your waste expenses.
Pricing is also another massive profit center. 1-4 times a year, most haulers will increase their rates by as much as 10%. They can do this because your contract lets them; it doesn’t have language prohibiting or limiting price hikes. Most people don’t fight them because a) they can’t and b) they don’t notice them. Or, they do notice and think it’s normal!
But just because everyone tolerates price hikes doesn’t mean it’s a good thing! (Remember your mom saying, “If everyone you know jumped off a bridge, would you do it, too?!”)
Profit centers make it easy for waste haulers to charge you way too much for a service that, really, is pretty straightforward.
You Can Stop Overspending on Waste
Most companies know that their waste management is really awful. They know that something is wrong, but they can’t seem to find relief from constant waste headaches.
But you have more options than you realize! Spending a little time familiarizing yourself with your waste management will show you where your problems are - and how you can fix them.
Take some time to conduct a basic waste audit (or learn how we conduct an extensive one!), then take a look at how to evaluate your waste hauler contract.
You can take charge of your waste and recycling disposal expenses - and you can start today!
Why Care About My Waste Expenses?
On top of everything else you’re doing, why bother looking at your waste expenses? Why should anyone pay attention to, well, garbage?
On top of everything else you’re doing, why bother looking at your waste expenses? Why should anyone pay attention to, well, garbage?
Because for most companies out there, your waste disposal has problems you don’t know about. You’re likely being overcharged for poor services. And you and your staff are wasting time on solving waste problems that should have never arisen in the first place.
Too many companies spend too much time and money trying to make their waste and recycling disposal process work for them. This may be normal, but it’s not right.
The very best thing you can do for your company when it comes to waste expenses? Call problems problems - name them for what they are.
Employing a hauler who consistently raises prices isn’t okay. Experiencing customer service failures over and over again isn’t okay. Being unable to break your contract when you really need to isn’t okay.
We’ve run into so many problems in the waste industry, but the three biggest reasons you should care about your waste disposal process are:
Overpriced services
Takes too much time to fix problems
The waste industry doesn’t always play fair
Monitoring your waste expenses will help you see how much these issues are affecting you and your staff on a day to day basis. And knowing more about these concerns can go a long way towards building an effective, intentional waste reduction strategy.
Reason #1: Waste Services are Too Expensive
Imagine with me for a minute. Say you and your family take a trip to the beach. You have a wonderful time digging in the sand, making sandcastles, and just relaxing.
But a week later, you hear a story on the radio that makes you stop in your tracks.
Just a day after you left, someone found a chest of old gold coins buried on that exact beach. There are hundreds of them - and they’re priceless. And you missed finding them!
You’d probably be a little upset: we were building sand castles on it the whole time! Why couldn’t that have been us?
The good news is, you don’t have to miss out on savings when it comes to your waste expenses.
95% companies across all industries are sitting on thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars in waste savings every year - and they have no idea.
If you spend more than $10,000 annually on waste, there’s a good chance you’re sitting on savings.
Or, to put it another way, you’re probably overspending - often by no fault of your own!
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 contract.
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 (there are dozens of them) can compound over time, too. Paying a $40 fuel fee every month may not seem like that much. But over 5 years, 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.
Reason #2: Monitoring Waste Services Takes Too Much Time
Who loves spending forty-five minutes on hold waiting to yell at your hauler? Spoiler alert - absolutely no one. You shouldn’t have to babysit your hauler to ensure that he’s going to do what he’s contractually obligated to do.
It can take persistence and perseverance to make sure the haulers perform to your standards.
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.
Time spent fixing service issues is time that could be spent on other projects. And that lost time can add up in unexpected ways.
Reason #3: The Waste Industry Isn’t Fair
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 trick you into signing contracts that are in their favor; paying the prices they want for the services they decide you should have. They don’t often give their clients the full picture of what they’re really signing up for.
This isn’t okay. It’s not okay ethically or morally. And it’s not fair to you, the people with whom they do business.
Get a Waste Reduction Strategy
You should care about your waste because it’s costing you. It’s costing you money, time, and effort. But it’s also plain wrong. You shouldn’t be tricked just because you don’t know better.
You deserve to have waste service that actually serves you - not one that creates headaches.
Waste worries are like ants at a picnic - the fewer the better. But because of the way contracts and pricing are set up, it’s pretty common for companies to have more than one complaint about their waste services.
Price hikes happen without warning and seem impossible to prevent (making budgeting a nightmare). Service issues keep happening. And you (or your staff’s) are putting too much time trying to correct a situation that doesn’t seem to be getting any better.
Small or large, headaches aren’t a good thing. It’s the same with waste worries - small problems are still problems.
Waste disposal problems of any size can be prevented and eliminated. We want you to be well-equipped so that you can prevent waste headaches - and you can start right here!
Use these resources to think strategically about your waste reduction efforts and methods.
Learn how your waste contracts make you over pay
Learn how you can stop overpaying on waste worries
Learn how we’ve helped other companies find relief from waste worries
What questions can we answer for you? Let us know in the comments below!