Waste Choices, Australia’s first online marketplace for waste management and recycling was launched today for businesses wanting a transparent and compliant solution for waste collection, recycling, treatment and disposal.
Through Waste Choices, businesses of any size have the flexibility of posting a one-off project or an ongoing contract for the management of over 30 waste streams.
A range of reputable waste management providers across Australia including URM, 1300 Rubbish, Action Waste, Waste 2 Resources, State Waste Services, Bingo and smaller providers will bid for posted projects and businesses can select whom they wish to work with.
Small and medium businesses, hospitality, food services, property management and construction companies would stand to benefit most from working with Waste Choices.
Joel Harrison, Co-Founder of Waste Choices said, “Waste Choices simplifies the management of waste by providing businesses the choice and flexibility of working with different service providers to manage various waste streams in a compliant manner. The cost of managing and disposing waste has increased over the years. Waste Choices offers businesses a better way to manage their waste streams by providing more options and access to a wider range of service providers.”
Businesses can post a waste project in three simple steps: entering the pick-up location, type of waste to be collected from general waste, liquid waste, recycling to hazardous materials and selecting a bin size to represent the volume of waste. They will be able to select from a range of competitive bids from 14 national and state-based waste management providers with the flexibility to award a project based on price or reputation of the provider.
Christine Ford, General Manager of Trio Packaging and a foundation client of Waste Choices said, “Before Waste Choices, it would take more than two days for us to call and secure a service provider to provide a quote and to confirm a job. Since we’ve started using Waste Choices, we receive a range of competitive bids from different providers for one-off or ongoing projects. Waste Choices has not only reduced my waste costs, it has also reduced the time it takes for us to identify a reputable service provider.”
Waste Choices offers an automatic alert feature that notifies businesses that are on annual contracts with service providers when they are about to expire. This avoids businesses getting automatically rolled into new contracts with their existing providers which would generally attract price increases of between 10-25 percent on average annually.
Harrison added, “Many businesses get stuck with their existing service providers because their annual contracts are automatically rolled over. Australia has over 2 million business waste generators and Waste Choices will free them from long term fixed contracts, help drive down the cost of waste management and increase the transparency through a system of bidding.”
“Waste Choices brings a new competitive advantage to the industry by opening the waste disposal market to smaller service providers who want to grow their market share and to target new customers without making additional capital constraints such as hiring sales people or leasing trucks to manage waste collections. This is a win-win solution for both businesses and service providers.”
According to IBISWorld, the industry is valued at over $2.5 billion in Australia. There has been a concerted effort by state and local governments to increase targets for recycling and waste recovery with the aim of reducing the amount of waste going to landfill. However, with Australia’s growing population and business activity, the demand for waste management services is expected to continue to grow.
Waste Choices will be available as an iOS and Android app by December 2014.