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Part 5 of 7 · Waste collection verifier series ~6 min read

What fill levels say about the contract

The credits are satisfying and small. The money is in the standing charge, and the only way to argue about a standing charge is with three months of evidence about how full the bins actually were.

Key takeaways

  • Three months of one-tap fill levels is enough to act on.
  • A bin collected at sixty percent is a frequency decision, not a fact of nature.
  • Check the seasonal pattern before cutting, or you will reinstate it in November.
  • Take the evidence to the incumbent first. It is usually cheaper than switching.
  • The renewal date needs six months of notice, not six weeks.

What three months of taps produces

Average fill level at collection across four waste streamsA bar chart with four bars showing average fill at collection as a percentage. General waste: fifty-eight. Mixed recycling: ninety-one. Cardboard: forty-four. Glass: thirty-seven. A note says two of these are collected too often and one is collected too rarely, and none of it was visible before somebody started tapping a button.050100150200~58General waste~91Mixed recycling~44Cardboard~37GlassAverage fill at collection, %Two of these are collected too often and one is collected too rarely. None of it was visible before somebody started tapping a button.
Fig 1. Average fill at the moment of collection, per stream. The recycling bin at ninety-one percent is as much of a finding as the glass bin at thirty-seven.

The glass bin at thirty-seven percent is being collected weekly and could go fortnightly. The cardboard bin is a smaller container. The recycling bin at ninety-one percent is about to start overflowing and cause exactly the contamination charges from Part 4.

Under-servicing is a finding too

It is tempting to treat this purely as a cost-cutting exercise, but the bin that is always nearly full is generating overflow, side waste charges, and contamination as people cram things in. Adding a collection there can reduce the total bill.

That also makes the conversation with the contractor a genuine negotiation rather than a demand. Proposing to drop one glass collection and add one recycling collection is a much easier discussion than asking for a reduction.

The seasonal trap

How a seasonal pattern undermines a collection frequency reductionA vertical chain of four steps entered by a box labelled Three months of data taken in spring. Step one, Cut a collection because it was forty percent full. Step two, Fine for months, a genuine saving. Step three, November arrives and volume doubles, with a side box noting overflow charges and side waste. Step four, Reinstated at a worse rate. A note says use twelve months of data, or cut against the busiest month you have measured, not the average.AWS ACCOUNTThree months of datataken in springCut a collectionit was 40% fullFine for monthsgenuine savingNovember arrivesvolume doublesOverflow chargesand side wasteReinstated, at aworse rateTwelve months of data, or cut against the busiest month you have measured. Not the average.
Fig 2. How a correct decision on the data available becomes an expensive one. The fix costs nothing: cut against your peak rather than your mean.
  • Machine learning
  • Management
  • Analytics

Cut against the peak

Most businesses know their own seasonality perfectly well and simply do not apply it here. A hospitality site in February and the same site in December are different operations, and a contract sized for February is one that fails at the worst possible time of year.

Where twelve months of data does not exist yet, the honest approach is to size against the fullest month you have measured and revisit once a year of data exists. That is slower and it does not produce a decision you have to reverse.

The renewal date

Why waste contracts renew themselves

  • Long initial terms, frequently three years, sometimes five.
  • Automatic renewal unless notice is given in a specific window before the end date.
  • Notice windows measured in months, and often requiring written notice by a specific method.
  • Which means the decision point is six to nine months before the date anybody has in their head.
  • And that date lives in a PDF, in the same folder as the schedule and the rate card, unread since the day it was signed.

This is the single highest-value field extracted from the contract, and it is one date. Everything else in this system saves you tens or hundreds of pounds a month; missing a notice window commits you to another three years of a rate you had evidence to renegotiate.

Take it to the incumbent first

With three months of fill data, a record of missed collections and a list of queried charges, the conversation with your existing contractor is straightforward and usually productive. They would rather adjust a schedule than lose a site, and switching has real costs in container swaps and disruption.

Getting a competitive quote is still worth doing, and having the evidence makes the quotes comparable for the first time — because you can ask everybody to price the same measured volumes rather than the same guess.

What this system is really for

None of this is complicated. Someone taps a button in the morning, an invoice gets read properly, and a date sits in a diary.

The reason it does not happen is that the contract, the collections and the invoice live in three different places and belong to three different people. Joining them is the whole intervention, and the fill data that falls out of it is worth more than everything else put together.

Next: what all of this costs to run.

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