Managing your Office's recycling and waste contract

Staying in touch with your waste service provider is an important part of ensuring your recycling service is going to plan. This is often referred to as contract management.

If you have a formal contract, this may mean regular contract meetings during which both parties can discuss what’s working well and highlight any issues. If you don’t have a formal contract, regular contact is likely to be less formal, such as phone conversations or ad hoc meetings. Either way, you can bring in information gleaned from your performance review and employee feedback.

The types of the issues raised by either you or your provider might include:

• Collections– whether bins are being collected in a timely manner as per your agreement 

• Timings – whether collection times work for your business

• Costs – are they in line with what you expected? Do prices need to change due to fluctuations in the costs of goods and services?

• Health and safety – are bins being presented overfull or too heavy? This may mean you need more bins or more frequent collections

• Quality concerns – are contamination levels higher than expected? How can you address this?

Hopefully any issues raised can be resolved by working together and agreeing a plan of action. If not, you may need to consider terminating your agreement or contract and setting up your service again.