Summary: The cost of waste management is often higher than businesses realize due to hidden fees, inefficiencies, and overlooked operational expenses. This blog explores how large enterprises can uncover these hidden costs, why waste management is so expensive, and what solutions exist to reduce the burden while improving efficiency and sustainability.
Some form of waste management service is a requirement for sanitary, efficient, and compliant operations. For many larger companies, that fact can lead to the acceptance of excessively high costs in waste management.
While waste management is a fixed need for every large business, it shouldn’t be a fixed cost. As hidden waste collection charges and disposal fees add up, the cost of waste management can negatively impact not only budgets, but efficiency and sustainability goals as well.
Finding and avoiding these charges that lie under the surface of waste management services, a partner equipped to help your organization reduce and streamline them, is crucial for efficiency.
Learn more about how to identify these costs, what companies can do to avoid them, and find answers to frequently asked questions about waste management costs here.
The exact nature of commercial waste management costs can vary substantially by industry and company size.
There are many significant differences between the costs of disposing of hazardous waste for a large chemical manufacturer and construction waste disposal costs for a local commercial builder, just as one example. Or, the cost of medical waste disposal for a small health system versus the cost of green waste disposal for a multi-state agricultural cooperative.
That said, there are common hidden costs that large businesses are likely to encounter. They each contribute in their small, incremental way to the global direct cost of waste management, which the UN calculated as $252 billion in 2020.
These hidden costs include, but are not limited to:
Variable costs related to the weight and volume of waste, contamination penalties, fuel surcharges, dumpster rental fees, and many others can be difficult to track at a granular level, especially for large businesses with multiple locations.
Large companies can be left without a practical way to ensure they aren’t facing excessive charges. One path to addressing these variable and sometimes excessive costs is to partner with a waste management service provider that leverages advanced technology.
This makes it possible to identify vendor billing errors, over- and underservicing of dumpsters, and excessive rate increases – and take action to reduce costs.
UC Berkeley reports that contamination – mixing of recyclables and nonrecyclables – costs roughly $300 million per year. That cost often passes from recovery facilities to haulers, and ultimately, their customers.
A lack of employee education and engagement, the absence of appropriate receptacles and signage, and issues with visibility into these passed-along costs can all harm large businesses.
Solutions can range from more effective education and providing the necessary collection tools to partnering with a waste management service provider to better identify these hidden costs with technology.
The costs of employees managing waste instead of focusing on core tasks won’t show up on a hauler’s statement, but they will increase operational downtime and inefficiency. Waste overflow and mismanagement can cause delays or shutdowns in key production processes and workflows.
Working with a fully managed, tech-enhanced service provider can provide the insight needed to identify waste overflow and mismanagement. It’s far easier to make the right adjustments when your waste management partner shares key insights and takes a more active role in oversight.
The cost of waste management varies substantially between industries and companies, although a UN report calculated the global direct cost of waste management as $252 billion in 2020. Individual large enterprises can spend between $10,000-$100,000 or more on a per-month basis
For individual businesses, having the right tech, tools, and partner to generate insight into operations and make effective adjustments is the best path to reducing the cost of waste management.
Factors affecting the cost of waste management range from vendor labor and fuel costs to the scarcity of landfill space (which increases tipping fees) and a variety of compliance costs.
With so many cost issues in play, data-driven oversight of waste management practices for individual businesses is crucial. Optimizing waste management is often far easier with both advanced technology and a partner providing fully managed services on your side.
RoadRunner takes a fully managed, data-driven, tech-enhanced approach to waste management, serving as a full partner for your organization. Our customers enjoy an average cost savings of 12% after choosing to work with our team.