Compacting Waste for Businesses: Why Is It Important?

Compacting Waste for Businesses

Waste disposal isn’t the most glamorous part of any business operation. Most business owners don’t even spend much time thinking about the trash generated by their company. Nonetheless, taking the time to plan and manage your waste management systems can be a worthwhile endeavor.

In particular, any company looking to streamline its waste management can greatly benefit from investing in commercial trash compactors like GK Industrial compactors.

This feature is sharing the basics of a trash compactor and enumerates the numerous benefits it can provide to your business. Keep on reading to learn more.

What’s A Trash Compactor

Most people probably have an idea of what a trash compactor is, but for the uninitiated, a compactor is a mechanism or machine used to reduce the size of waste material via compaction. Trash compaction means compressing or crushing collected garbage and can be used in both residential and commercial settings to reduce the volume of waste produced.

Trash compactors are easy to operate and use simple components and mechanisms. They typically include:

  • A waste bin that collects and stores trash;
  • A metal ram that compresses or crushes the trash; and
  • An electrical switch to power the unit.

Operating a trash compactor is pretty straightforward. You simply place your business waste and trash into the bin. Once the bin is full, you turn the compactor to crush or compress the trash into smaller, manageable pieces.

Why Is Waste Compaction Important For Your Business

Waste compaction is a simple yet highly effective way of dealing with waste materials in various industries and businesses. But what exactly are the benefits that trash compaction offers? Continue reading to learn more.

1. It Saves On Operational Expenses

Businesses generate waste. And managing this waste will cost your company money. But implementing a company-wide solid waste management system can help reduce your business’s overall operational expenses in this area.

While investing in a commercial trash compactor will require you to shell out tens of thousands of dollars upfront, that added expense can be recouped by the savings you’ll make in proper waste management in the long run.

By compacting your trash, businesses can reduce waste volume and size. This results in smaller garbage pileups while reducing the human resources needed to deal with trash piles. As mentioned before, trash compactors are easy to operate with just a single touch of a button. The compacted trash is also easier to transport since you’re only now dealing with a single block of trash instead of many loose pieces.

With smaller waste volumes and sizes, you can have fewer skips to rent, which further reduces operational costs. A trash compactor can save a few trips to the landfill or dump as well. Thus, you can save more on transportation time, fuel, and overall costs of hauling trash.

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2. It Provides Better Site Sanitation And Hygiene

Poorly managed trash is unsightly and unhealthy. Nonetheless, investing in trash compaction can help put away your trash and waste more discreetly, ensuring better sanitation and hygiene.

Sealed and compacted trash reduces odor. It also prevents vermin and pests from getting access to your trash, reducing the risk of infestation which can cause serious health problems. Since compacted trash is sealed, it ensures that bacterial growth won’t be as rampant too.

Furthermore, since compaction transforms your trash into neat, easy-to-haul blocks, you can discreetly place and store them in a corner until it’s time to be collected. This means you can eliminate unsightly and smelly mountains of trash that disgust passersby and customers. So, not only can it help with sanitation, but it also makes your business premises aesthetically pleasing and more organized.

In short, you’ll have a cleaner and more hygienic business environment overall.

3. It Improves Safety On Business Premises

In addition to improving site hygiene and cleanliness, waste compaction contributes to safer business premises too. An improper waste management system can cause severe and sometimes fatal accidents around your business premises.

If your commercial garbage overflows from your bins and is left lying around your premises, it can be a safety hazard for employees, customers, and passersby. People may slip, fall, or trip on the accumulated trash and sustain serious injuries. Your business will have to face costly lawsuits and pay compensation for the victims due to a sloppy waste management system in place.

Instead of handling loose trash, your worker can take advantage of the easy-to-use modern trash compacting equipment. With a single push of a button, you get blocks of trash that can be easily moved and organized. This helps eliminate piles of unstable garbage bags and disgusting leakages, which can also cause fall and slip injuries.

Since compacted garbage stays in shape, you also don’t have to worry about loose sharp objects that could cause cuts or injuries when moving the trash. Plus, it allows you to move compacted bales of trash with a hand cart, reducing the possibility of back injuries that comes with manually moving heavy bags by hand.

In addition, exposed dumpsters can also cause other safety issues such as misuse or pilferage by your workers and passersby. Yet with compaction, you don’t have to worry about any of these concerns. Since compacted trash means fewer waste collection trips, it also helps reduce potential accidents or collisions caused by moving garbage collection vehicles, increasing safety on your business premises.

Compacting Waste

4. It Frees Up More Space

One of the key benefits of compaction is that it helps reduce your waste volume and size. As a result, it helps free up more space in your business premises and makes garbage easier to manage.

With smaller, compacted waste, storage and disposal become much easier. In general, compressed trash takes up only about a tenth of the space that uncompacted waste occupies. This means you gain extra room for storage or use some of the space for other purposes.

5. It Minimizes Your Negative Impact To The Environment

Of all the numerous benefits of compacting your business trash, the positive environmental impact is the most important. In fact, most of the above-mentioned advantages contribute to this critical benefit.

As mentioned many times before, a compactor can help reduce the size and volume of your trash. This results in better removal, transportation, and disposal processes of trash and waste. It’ll take less energy to remove and haul waste and requires less space, so you can transport more trash in a single trip, preventing the negative impact caused by gas emissions from garbage trucks.

Furthermore, with less trash, you contribute to improving landfills’ longevity and capacity. With landfills, the more waste they receive, the quicker they’ll fill up and become useless. Nonetheless, if all waste that arrives at a landfill is in a compacted form, its lifespan can be extended. Consequently, this can also mean that there will be fewer landfills and saving much-needed land as well as wildlife.

6. It Boosts Your Brand Reputation

In today’s world, consumers are becoming more eco-conscious. Thus, running a business with minimal environmental impact is more important than ever and compacting your trash is one of the best ways of working towards this.

In general, businesses that implement green initiatives in their processes are looked upon more favorably by the general consumers. Even employees tend to appreciate and feel good when their company has effective eco-friendly programs and initiatives.

Consumers have become pickier toward businesses they’re patronizing. They often prefer businesses that are making efforts to become eco-friendlier. So, since compacting helps boost your green initiatives, it can help boost your reputation and gain more customers.

And you won’t just attract a few environmentally inclined consumers either. Most people care strongly for the environment. In fact, a report shows that over 60% of survey respondents are willing to pay more for eco-friendly and sustainable products. In particular, millennials are the most willing group (over 70%) to pay extra for such offerings.

You can become the company that implements policies to fight against environmental problems and show your commitment to being an environmentally responsible organization.

7. It Can Offer Potential Added Revenue

You probably know that there’s money in the trash, even compacted ones. As with most types of trash, there’s a possibility of selling compacted recyclable materials such as plastic or cardboard. This helps create a new revenue stream, allowing you to make even just a small profit or accumulate some capital that you can use elsewhere in your supply chain.

In addition, depending on your location, some local governments may also offer monetary incentives as well as tax relief for businesses that implement green policies like trash compaction.

Takeaway

Most business owners think twice about getting a commercial trash compactor. After all, it requires hefty cash to buy or even rent one. But investing in a commercial compactor is a sound business decision.

Commercial compactors can make your waste smaller, neater, and easier to manage. It streamlines your waste management process, helping your business save money, improve hygiene and aesthetics around your commercial property, and positively contribute to the environment as well as your brand image in the long run.