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Imagine that a product is recalled a few days before your latest order comes through. Something’s wrong with the electronics, a logo was misprinted, or it flat-out doesn’t work.
They’ve already been shipped, but now they’re absolutely worthless and sitting in a customs warehouse, costing the broker money until they can get rid of them. That’s where Trashco Inc. comes in as a Special Waste Disposal Consultant/Coordinator.
Today we’ll be showing how our team enables forwarding agencies and customs broker warehouses to deal with their special waste cases, minus the panic. We’ll go into:
Let’s get started.
Source by Toll Compaction, image used under license CC BY-NC 4.0
The primary types of bulk waste that we here at Trashco Inc. help forwarding agencies and customs brokers dispose of largely depend on the type of products that have been ordered and then passed on to them.
Remember, forwarding agencies organize the ongoing movements of products by communicating with carriers on behalf of shippers, and customs broker warehouses hold goods with suspended payments (namely, duty and VAT charges) before they’re moved on. Both of these frequently have to dispose of bulk items that they haven’t personally ordered, meaning the contents can vary wildly depending on the original source of those orders.
Having said that, there are a few types of waste that we see from these companies more often than others:
Hand sanitizer is something that most businesses still have on hand - the main COVID scare may be over, but it pays to keep up with some of the good hygiene practices that the global lockdowns gave us. However, there comes a point where companies need to dispose of their excess, order too much and make a late cancellation after it’s been shipped, or potentially even fold after already making an order for more. In all of these cases and more, you’re left with potentially gallons of waste sanitizer that needs to be disposed of.
Non-hazardous materials are pretty much what you’d expect from their name; anything that isn’t strictly hazardous but still needs to be disposed of correctly. This ranges from paper, cardboard, and metal, through to items like plastic packaging and food waste. Some can be recycled or composted, some used as fuel, and others may need treatment and disposal.
When products are recalled, expire, or are defective and are not suitable for upcycling or recycling they need to be destroyed according to specific rules of disposal. The difficulty in disposing of them is that they often require proof of delivery to the disposal facility and proof of destruction, potentially even via a specific method. Otherwise their disposal relies on the type of product and what materials they’re made out of.
Finally, electronic waste is awkward to dispose of due to how much of it can be recycled, and how much requires processing (such as data removal) prior to disposal. Our friends over at the Clean Management Environmental Group, Inc. have an excellent rundown of what goes into disposing of electronic waste if you’re interested in learning more.
To quickly summarize, product destruction services provide vital assurance to companies needing to dispose of their special waste.
Whether you’re trying to save the environment by disposing of hazardous waste according to your local regulations, save your company by preventing public access to defective products that have been recalled and can’t be fixed, or save your brand by preventing your old or off-spec products from surfacing on the gray market, it’s vital to use a fully trained and regulation-compliant product destruction service.
Remember; throwing out the waste yourself doesn’t just add to your local landfill. Depending on the waste, it can poison your local environment, cause your brand to be associated with defective goods that have been resold, or much worse.
First, we will talk to the company to gather information on the types of waste that need to be disposed of. We typically start by profiling and classifying the types of waste as mentioned above (electronic, regulated non-hazardous, etc). We will also note basic information such as:
Most of this is usually easy to pin down, letting us move right along to the next stage in disposal. After all, these are companies that are dealing with orders of bulk materials, meaning that (in theory) the materials they need to dispose of are already classified, weighed, and a reason for disposal given, as they’ve been shipped to that location as part of a supply chain.
The vital part of this stage is mostly down to getting this information as quickly as possible so that disposal can go ahead. It’s a good job that our team at Trashco Inc. is well-experienced in getting things done!
Finding suitable disposal locations mostly boils down to whether you’ve interacted with specific facilities before.
Most of the bulk products that need to be disposed of will come with documentation confirming the need for destruction or processing at facilities with specific capabilities, meaning that the difficult part in this stage is knowing where sites with said capabilities and permits are. Special permits, documents, and certificates of destruction are all invaluable in quickly letting our team identify where various waste items need to be sent.
That’s not even mentioning how many times the Trashco Inc. team has disposed of these kinds of waste before; at this point we could guide our customers through the entire process in our sleep! All that’s left is to arrange their transport.
The final step is to facilitate transport to the special waste’s disposal destination. This is another area where our team excels, as we have a fleet of state-of-the-art vehicles ready to transport any kind of waste you have to its destination.
Once our trucks have handed off the products we also make sure to get pictures and confirmation of both our arrival on site and the disposal of the relevant materials. This is the type of confirmation required for the original customer (the customs broker warehouse or forwarding agency) to prove to the relevant authorities that their waste was disposed of according to all relevant regulations, should they get inspected on that front.
In other words, Trashco Inc. is there with our customers from the moment we’re contacted through to the safe, environmentally-friendly, and efficient disposal of all of their waste. Through our partnerships with companies like the Clean Management Environmental Group, Inc we’re ready to adapt to whatever requests you throw our way. Whether we have a truck full of hand sanitizer or defective complex products, we know exactly how to handle it so that you don’t go through the same headache.
