I had a letter today from my waste bin people, telling me they were putting my prices up as our bin was always too heavy. I was of the opinion that they are taking the p*ss and I had a bit of time before tonights AGM at the club to compose my response to their letter. I dont really care what they say. If they dont impose a price increase I will just let life go on. If they do, I will get someone else to empty it. But I felt it a worthwhile exercise in letterwriting......... Dear Ms C Thank you for your letter of 19th November 2014 where you advised that you have been reviewing your waste collection rounds and have determined, somehow, without the use of scales that our 1100 ltr general waste cart is consistently over the expected weight for general waste services You then helpfully point out that this can be caused by a high proportion of food waste or glass weight or other heavy and non compactable material. I immediately reviewed your extensive website, but despite an exhaustive search I was unable to find out what the expected weight for general waste services was. I did have a long read about the Materials Recycling Facility or MRF at Wellingborough and Luton, from which would reasonably appear that whatever is in the cart, goes to these sites and is sorted/recyled at that point. Our cart contents will not have changed almost at all in 15/20 years. We have a small kitchen, not a restaurant, banquet hall or or other such food and beverage function suite. Given that our food sales takings per week average at about £250/£300 per WEEK and you empty the cart every week, we would have to have people bringing in food waste from outside of the business to chuck it in our cart, to make the food waste on weekly basis amount to any substantial weight or volume. What we buy in, we sell. We put the empty wrappings in the bin. The only way it might leave the premises in the same volume is via the sewer, but generally I find that people are here for a short time and tend to take that bit with them. We have a small bar, which does have bottled beers. We have two small trugs or plastic handled buckets which we use to store empty bottles as they are used, which are then emptied into the cart. The volume of bottled beer that we buy in on a weekly basis, which again, unless we are shipping in empty bottles for the sole purpose of disposing of them in our cart, amounts to around maybe 40/50 bottles. Therefore it would be difficult for us to be disposing of more than we buy. We sell, in our bar and golf shop, plastic bottled water and energy drinks and cans, and golfers often bring their own as well. As they have to carry them around the course, they tend to avoid the glass ones as they can break if dropped and they are heavy to carry 4 to 5 miles around a golf course and generally not resealable on the golf course. We empty our litter bins which contain this stuff once a week. Plastic bottles and aluminium cans are, in my opinion, a lightweight compactable trade waste and indeed I would estimate that this makes up over 50% of the volume of the cart contents on a weekly basis. The other week, we did do an evening function, and for the first time in many many months, the cart lid almost didnt shut, due to the number of black bin bags therein. Given that these bags were bulky because they contained polystyrene plates and bowls from the buffet, once again I would consider that to be a compactable trade waste. I would therefore be grateful if you could provide me with the legal definition of the expected weight for general waste services and the industry standard or even British Standard that defines this. Can you please also itemise the weights over which my waste cart has exceeded those industry standards on a week by week basis over the past 6 months, on a paper/cardboard/glass/foodwaste subsection so that I can review our working practices here, cross referencing it with our schedule of functions to see if we can identify when and who is nefariously disposing of heavy waste in our general cart which is causing difficulties for the lifting hydraulics on your lorries. Or perhaps you can review your letter suggesting that you are increasing our prices and consider that this may in fact be an error and that our prices can remain as they are. I will be happy to meet you onsite here on any day that you might choose so that you can lift the lid of the cart and review its half empty interior. I look forward to hearing from you shortly. Yours Sincerely Steve Rumball chalgravegolf.co.uk Great Golf Great Prices and rubbish bin consistently containing greater than the expected weght for general waste services.......
Posted on: Fri, 21 Nov 2014 19:18:11 +0000