How waste management businesses can use the winter slowdown to improve efficiency, reduce costs and prepare for a more profitable spring.
Fuel prices have reached eye-watering levels. Staff costs are through the roof. Disposal costs and availability continue to cause headaches across much of the industry. And the markets for recovered materials aren’t exactly showering us with good news.
Now, just to make things more interesting, we’re heading into the seasonal slowdown.
Fewer skips. Less waste. Less revenue. But pretty much the same fixed costs to cover.
For businesses already operating on thin margins, it’s a fairly unpleasant combination. I suspect quite a few owners are looking at the months ahead with a growing sense of dread.
And I don’t blame them. The winter of 2026/27 could be pretty miserable for a lot of waste companies.
But I want to suggest something rather different.
What if the winter slowdown is actually an opportunity?
Not an opportunity to make the problems disappear. Nor am I suggesting that declining tonnages are somehow good news.
But there are things you can do during a quieter period that are extraordinarily difficult to achieve when your operation is running flat out. And some of them could make a substantial difference to your profitability when the volumes return.
When was the last time you had room to think?
Anyone who’s managed a busy waste transfer station will recognise the problem.
During the summer, every square yard is occupied. Trucks are queuing. The loading shovel is permanently on the move. The picking line is running flat out, and everyone is concentrating on getting today’s waste through the operation before tomorrow’s arrives.
There’s barely enough time to snort a Gregg’s sausage roll, never mind step back and wonder whether there’s a better way of doing things, and whenever somebody suggests an improvement, the response is usually familiar:
“We’ll have a look at that when things quieten down.”
Well, guess what?
Things are about to quieten down. So let’s make something of it!
1. Try something different in the yard
One of the biggest obstacles to improving a waste processing operation is the simple fact that it never stops.
Changing the layout of push walls or picking areas, experimenting with different material separation arrangements or testing a new recovery process can be impossible when there’s a constant stream of waste arriving.
But when volumes decline mid-winter, you suddenly have something rather valuable: space.
And perhaps a little time.
Could you rearrange the picking area to make material recovery easier? Could a different loading arrangement improve throughput? Are there materials disappearing into your residual waste that could be recovered economically with a relatively simple change?
Perhaps there’s an opportunity to separate something before it reaches the shredder, rather than trying to recover it after it’s been chopped into little pieces.
Or perhaps the opportunity is to stop recovering a particular material because its disposal costs now exceed any benefit from separating it.
Because that’s an important distinction and one with fluid outcomes; markets are not static, so your processing approach shouldn’t be either.
Improving a waste processing operation doesn’t necessarily mean recycling more. It means producing better commercial outcomes from the waste you handle.
There’s little point recovering another five tonnes of material if nobody wants to buy it, or if the cost of separating, storing and transporting it exceeds the saving.
Start with the destination for the material, work backwards through the processing operation, and use the quieter periods to test whether your ideas actually work.
You might be surprised by what you discover.
2. Make your people better at what they do
The waste industry has traditionally been pretty good at teaching people how to do their own jobs. But, working with many waste firms, I’ve observed two weaknesses: a lack of understanding of what colleagues in other teams do – and why! – and the absence of cross-training to ensure contingency for colleague absences.
Drivers know how to drive trucks. Picking line staff know how to pick materials. Weighbridge operators know how to process tickets. But how many understand how their decisions affect the profitability of the wider business?
A driver collecting a badly overloaded skip might think he’s doing the customer a favour. The yard staff receiving it might have a different opinion and the commercial manager a different view again.
A loading shovel operator might be concentrating on feeding the processing line as quickly as possible, without appreciating how the way material is presented affects recovery quality.
And a supervisor might be excellent at managing their own team while knowing surprisingly little about the pressures facing the department next door.
A quieter period creates an opportunity to address some of these gaps.
Get departments to deliver lunch-and-learn sessions. Cross-train staff so they’re more flexible when volumes recover. Help supervisors understand how the whole business works, rather than simply their particular corner of it.
And don’t assume that training means bringing in an external provider and booking a conference room. Some of the most valuable training can come from the people who already know the business. Including you.
If you’ve spent twenty or thirty years building a waste company, there’s probably an enormous amount of knowledge rattling around inside your head.
But that knowledge is of limited value if you never share it with the people getting their hands dirty.
Get out there. Explain why things matter. Show people how apparently small decisions affect the wider operation.
You might even discover they have a few ideas of their own.
3. Fix the things you’ve been putting off
Every waste business has them.
The maintenance job on the picking line that’s been waiting since April. The truck that desperately needs new suspension bushes. The leaking gutter that’s been soaking your plasterboard every time it rains. The conveyor that’s been making a peculiar noise for six months, but which nobody wants to stop because it’s still running. Even the yard layout that everyone complains about but which nobody could find a free morning to change.
During the busiest months, taking equipment out of service can create more problems than it solves. But when volumes fall, the calculation changes.
Perhaps you can take a processing line down for a day without creating a mountain of unprocessed waste. Perhaps a truck can spend a little longer in the workshop without leaving the schedulers tearing their hair out.
There’s an obvious financial benefit to preventing breakdowns, but there’s another benefit that’s often overlooked.
Maintenance carried out when you choose is considerably less disruptive than maintenance forced upon you by a breakdown.
And I’d extend this beyond machinery.
Look at the condition of the yard itself. Drainage, lighting, traffic and pedestrian route line-markings, storage areas, signage and all those little irritations that make people’s jobs harder than they need to be.
A few relatively modest improvements now could make the operation safer, more productive and less frustrating when things get busy again.
4. Sort out the processes that drive everyone mad
You know the ones.
The unnecessary paperwork. The daft vehicle scheduling arrangements. The pricing exceptions nobody can explain. The customer service problems that keep cropping up.
The customer who always gets preferential treatment despite being one of your least profitable accounts. The collection round that’s been organised the same way for ten years, even though half the customers have changed.
And the departments that seem to spend more time arguing about whose fault something is than working together to prevent it happening again.
These problems rarely appear overnight. They accumulate. Someone introduces a workaround to solve a particular problem. Someone else adds another process to accommodate it. A manager leaves, but their procedures remain.
Before long, you’ve got a business full of things that everybody does because that’s how they’ve always been done. And because everyone is busy, nobody has time to question them.
Winter might be the perfect opportunity to get the relevant people around a table and ask some rather basic questions.
Why do we do this? What would happen if we stopped? Could we do it differently?
And, most importantly, what difference would it make to the business?
I’d particularly encourage bringing together teams that have spent the summer squabbling with one another. Transport, operations, sales, customer service and finance are not independent businesses sharing the same premises.
They’re parts of one operation. And sometimes the biggest improvements come from getting people to understand how their decisions affect everyone else.
5. Find out where you’re actually making money
The point of improving operations isn’t simply to make the yard run more smoothly; it’s to improve the economics of the business. But if the yard’s sorted and you’d rather hide in the office with the radiator and a cuppa, I’d put this next one fairly high on the winter to-do list.
When a waste business is busy, it’s remarkably easy to confuse activity with profitability. The trucks are moving. The yard is full. The processing line is running. The phones are ringing. Everything looks healthy.
But what happens when tonnages fall?
Suddenly, those fixed costs become rather more conspicuous.
And the weaknesses in your pricing, collection arrangements and disposal costs can become painfully obvious. A quieter period is an excellent opportunity to examine the economics of what you’re actually doing.
Which customers are genuinely profitable once collection, processing and disposal costs are taken into account?
Which collection areas generate a worthwhile contribution, and which involve trucks travelling miles to collect relatively little revenue?
Are you paying to process materials that would be cheaper to handle differently? And do you know which materials are currently in demand?
Are your prices still based on the economics of today’s waste market, or the rather more forgiving conditions of five or ten years ago?
You don’t need a complicated financial model to start asking these questions.
But you do need to be prepared to uncover some uncomfortable answers.
Turnover keeps people busy. Profit keeps businesses alive.
And when there’s less turnover to go around, understanding the difference becomes particularly important.
6. And finally, get out more!
This might be my favourite suggestion of the lot.
Go and see your mates (or make new ones) in the industry.
Visit their yards. Have a cup of tea and a mutual moan about fuel prices, disposal costs, the Environment Agency and the general state of the world.
Then have a look around.
You might discover they’re doing something rather clever that you’ve never considered.
Perhaps they’ve found a better way of organising their picking operation. Perhaps they’ve changed how they schedule collections. Perhaps they’ve come up with a simple solution to a problem that’s been irritating you for years.
Or perhaps you’ll see something spectacularly stupid that reminds you why you do things differently. Both are educational. 😁
One of the problems with running a business is that it’s very easy to become trapped inside your own way of thinking. You see the same people, the same processes and the same problems every day. Eventually, things that ought to look ridiculous start looking perfectly normal.
Getting outside your own business can be an excellent way of challenging that. And you don’t necessarily need to visit another waste company. Sometimes the most useful ideas come from businesses operating in entirely different industries.
The trick is to keep your eyes open and your assumptions under review.
Don’t spend the winter waiting for spring
None of this changes the fact that the waste industry faces some pretty serious commercial pressures.
Fuel costs, employment costs, disposal capacity, material markets and seasonal declines in tonnage are not problems that individual operators can simply wish away.
And I certainly wouldn’t suggest that every struggling waste business can solve its problems by rearranging the yard and sending a few people on training courses.
But I do think there’s a danger in treating the winter slowdown as something that simply has to be endured. Because while we can’t control the market, we can control an awful lot of what happens inside our own businesses.
We can improve processes. Develop people. Maintain equipment. Challenge assumptions. Eliminate wasteful practices. And make better decisions about where and how we earn our money.
The businesses that emerge strongest next spring might not be those that spent the winter complaining most loudly about the conditions. I’d put my money on the ones that used the opportunity to do something about the things they could control.
So don’t spend the winter waiting for spring. Get busy so you’re ready for it.
And if you’d welcome a fresh pair of eyes on your operation, give me a call.
I’ll happily travel for a decent cup of tea and a chocolate Hobnob. 😁
About Gerald Price
Gerald Price is a business change consultant and interim managing director specialising in business turnarounds, operational improvement and commercial performance, especially within the waste and recycling industry.
Having worked with operators across the sector, he regularly writes about leadership, strategy, waste policy and the commercial realities facing UK waste businesses.
More articles and insights can be found at www.gpcp.co.uk and https://www.linkedin.com/in/geraldprice/
