Businesses across the UK discard endless bags of waste every year, from dry mixed recycling to food and hazardous waste. In 2020, the commercial and industrial sectors generated 40.4 million tonnes of business waste. An efficient waste management plan is essential to managing this rubbish safely and responsibly. At the heart of every business waste management plan are commercial bins.
This article covers the complete guide to commercial bins, from a 240-litre wheelie bin to an 1100-litre wheelie bin, lockable lids and hassle-free collections.
Understand Your Waste Types
Whether it’s paper or glass waste, plastic, cardboard or liquid, your business has specific requirements unique to you. To ensure you’re choosing accurate commercial bin sizes to match your business waste needs, plus the right frequency of collection services, the best way to kickstart this process is with a waste review.
A waste review will assess the amount and type of waste you produce, explore your current waste management processes, identify areas for improvement, and provide recommendations on enhancing recycling and reducing waste.
Even if your waste challenge seems complex, at Waste Mission, we can help you find simple, sustainable solutions.
A Commercial Bin for Every Type of Waste
Choosing the correct commercial bins for your business will enhance your operations, save you time, and ensure that valuable waste is turned into savings.
Let’s explore the wide array of commercial waste bins available for all waste streams.
Stackable Metal Containers
Scrap metal is a valuable asset, so appropriate containers should be built into your company's working processes to help enhance your operations.
All Waste Mission metal containers are stackable and have forklift guides to ensure safe and secure movement. Additionally, they are lidded, lockable, and Smartwater labelled, which helps prevent metal theft. Security tags can be provided to ‘lock’ the container while it is being transported.
As a final layer of security, all containers are fitted with a unique barcode. This barcode is directly linked to you and ensures that your materials can be identified easily.
1110 Litre Wheelie Bin
The largest wheelie bin available on the market is the 1110-litre wheelie – holding up to 15 rubbish bags.
These commercial wheelie bins are great for organising a single-waste stream recycling of:
- Cardboard waste
- Confidential waste
- Dry mixed recycling DMR
- Paper waste
- Plastic waste
- Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE)
- Food waste
- Glass recycling
- General waste
The 1110-litre wheelie bin has a lockable lid to keep waste safe and secure. These large wheelie bins also have wheels for convenient removal and to enable the bins to be moved around.
If you’re looking to reduce your waste collection, this large wheelie bin could be your answer.
660 Litre Wheelie Bin
This commercial waste wheelie bin is more compact than the largest but can still hold up to 12 bags of business waste.
Similar to large wheelie bins, the 660-litre wheelie bin is suitable for storing:
- Cardboard waste
- Confidential waste
- Dry mixed recycling DMR
- Paper waste
- Plastic waste
- Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE)
- Food waste
- Glass recycling
- General waste
With a lockable lid and wheels, both wheelie bins are available in different colours to ensure efficient single-waste stream recycling.
Two-Wheel Wheelie Bins
The two-wheel wheelie bin sizes range from 240 litres to 360 litres. These wheelie bins are great for smaller premises. It is possible to adapt them to be lockable and the wheels provide the ability to move them around to suit your business needs.
360-litre wheelie-bin
- Holds up to six bags of waste
240-litre wheelie-bin
- Holds up to five bags of waste
- Available in many colours to ensure no one gets confused with the single waste stream recycling
Both two-wheel wheelie bins are suitable for storing:
- Cardboard waste
- Confidential waste
- Dry mixed recycling DMR
- Garden waste
- Glass waste
- Paper waste
- Plastic waste
- Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE)
- Food waste
- Glass recycling
- General waste
Balers
Does your business dispose of a lot of paper, cardboard and plastic waste? If so, balers could be the perfect solution to help manage waste streams and ensure efficient recycling.
Balers work their magic by transforming vast quantities of single-stream commercial waste into neat bundles. Take polystyrene as an example. A baler can reduce the volume of polystyrene by 95%.
Balers carry significant environmental benefits and cost benefits for your business. By helping to separate your business waste effectively, you’ll send less waste to landfill and ultimately reduce your landfill tax. It's a double win for you and the environment.
Many varieties of balers are available, depending on your business's capacity. To find the option that suits you best, give Waste Mission a call today on 01438 745307.
Clinical Waste Bins and Bags
Some businesses, from beauty salons to hospitals, require bags and bins for infectious waste, body parts, and needles. Various options are available to suit your business waste.
Sharps bins
If your business produces waste that could puncture or cut skin – razor blades, tattoo needles, etc – you’re legally obliged to dispose of it using sharps bins. The sharps commercial bin sizes vary, depending on the waste your business needs to dispose of, plus they’re lockable and available in a range of colours.
Sharps bins need to be disposed of before they reach full capacity so make sure regular waste collections are arranged.
Clinical waste bags
Clinical waste bags are essential for safely storing and disposing of infectious, non-infectious, or hazardous waste. From dentists to care homes, veterinary practices, and tattoo parlours, businesses are legally required to store their clinical waste in secure bags or containers.
Clinical waste bags vary from 20 litres to 90 litres.
- Clear clinical waste bags. To dispose of lateral flow waste.
- Orange clinical waste bags. Infectious waste may need to be disinfected before incineration.
- Purple clinical waste bags. For hazardous cytotoxic and cytostatic waste.
- Red clinical waste bags. For body parts and blood bags.
- White clinical waste bags. For dental waste.
- Yellow clinical waste bags. For infectious medical waste.
- Yellow and black clinical waste bags. To dispose of non-infectious waste.
Clinical waste bins
Clinical waste bins are legally required to ensure infectious and hazardous waste is stored safely and disposed of correctly. The bin, the lid, and the bag inside are all colour-coded to prevent different waste types from being mixed up.
These bins range from small pedal bins to 240-litre wheelie bins and even to the 1100-litre wheelie bin. The largest wheelie bins can hold up to 18 bags of waste.
From sanitary waste to needles and body parts, clinical waste bins are used across hospitals, laboratories and beauty salons.
Sanitary Waste Bins
Business owners are legally required to ensure sanitary waste bins are available in workplaces and are emptied by a licensed carrier.
From 7-litre bins to 30-litre bins, sanitary waste bins ensure that feminine hygiene products are disposed of safely and in the best way for the environment.
Front-end loader and rear-end loader bins
If wheelie bins are too small for your business, it’s worth exploring whether the slightly more compact front-end loader or the large rear-end loader are better options for storing your commercial waste.
Due to their size and weight, these bins require industrial lifting equipment to move them.
Front-end loader bin
These large commercial waste bins require more space to fit on a site but can hold up to 80 bags of waste. They are also lockable to ensure the safety of valuable waste streams.
The front-end loader bin is available in two sizes, 8-yard or 10-yard, making these bins great for waste management, as each bin can hold a different waste type.
Rear-end loader bin
Shaped more like a skip and with a much greater capacity than the front-end loader bin, the rear-end loader bin can hold huge amounts of commercial waste.
The smallest bin holds 80 bags of waste, and the largest rear-end loader bin can hold up to 160 bags.
The rear-end loader is perfect for businesses that create a lot of dry waste, from metal waste to construction matter.
Roll On Roll Off Skips
If you have ample space on your premises, roll-on roll-off skips are one of the largest waste collection containers available.
Able to hold up to 12 tonnes of rubbish – 400 bags of waste – they’re perfect for manufacturing firms and large volumes of compactable industrial waste.
Roll-on roll-off skips are 20 feet long and 8 feet wide, but their heights vary from 4 feet to 8.5 feet. They’re great for disposing of general waste, metal waste, and industrial waste.
Drums and Tanks for Liquid Waste
Waste drums, barrels and tanks are available in a variety of sizes to help your business store the following waste types:
- Oil waste
- Liquid waste
- Hazardous waste
- Chemical waste
- Sands and grains
Your business is legally responsible for ensuring the safe and secure disposal of liquid waste. Below are various containers suitable for a wide range of business needs.
Waste drums
Ranging from 30-litre waste drums right up to 220-litre drums, they can be made of either steel or plastic and are available with a range of lids. Bung tops are ideal for liquid waste, whereas vented drums are best for aerosols.
At Waste Mission, our sealed containers are available to safely contain fluids and solutions, which are regularly leak-tested. They are also fitted with drainage taps so that coolants can be recycled.
IBC Container
Able to hold from 500 to 1,000 litres of liquid waste, the Intermediate Bulk Container (IBC) is the perfect option for businesses storing large volumes of hazardous and non-hazardous liquid waste. It’s important to note that IBC containers are not suitable for solid waste.
Across the commercial waste sector, there is a huge variety of bin sizes, types, and colours. If you have a waste type that we haven’t covered in this blog, please get in touch today.
Whether you choose an 1100-litre wheelie for segregating waste or a general waste bin, the next step is choosing how often your waste will be collected.
A Collection Schedule for Your Business Needs
Depending on your business's needs, a collection schedule can be arranged daily, weekly, or fortnightly. You can determine the collection day that works best for you.
At Waste Mission, we can tailor your waste requirements to your needs, regardless of how complex they might seem. Once we understand your requirements, you’ll be well on the way to an effective waste management plan that achieves your targets.
Summary
Our guide to commercial bins is aimed at helping your business decide on the best way to manage your rubbish safely and responsibly. At Waste Mission, we want to help companies move away from general waste bins and embrace single-waste stream recycling.
From small to large wheelie bins, determining collection services and understanding valuable waste types, our team of experts can help your business make savings through a clear waste management plan.
Book a waste review today to find out which bins are right for you.
