Why It Pays to Partner with National Waste Associates

A look at NWA vs National Haulers and Brokers
While some companies choose to work directly with individual waste haulers at each of their locations, this leaves a lot of the onus on the management team of that company to control their waste – and the costs associated with it.  If your company is ready to explore other possible solutions to relieve this burden, there are three models to consider … national haulers, brokers … and then there’s National Waste Associates!

First is the national hauler model. National haulers own the trucks, the containers and in most cases the landfills so there is a conflict, as they don’t necessarily have a vested interest in optimizing your service levels or diverting materials from landfills, as generally landfill rates are higher than recycling.

The second model is the broker.  They negotiate with the local haulers for each location and can find low prices.  However, as their role suggests, they typically broker the deal between the hauler and you, so you review and sign individual contracts with the haulers, leaving you liable for issues that may arise.

You might be familiar with some of these types such as Waste Management Inc, Waste Connections and Rubicon.

National Waste Associates (NWA) is neither a national hauler nor a broker.  NWA is a managed services provider who proactively manages your waste and recycling operations on a day-to-day basis relieving your administrative burden and freeing up you and your team to focus on other more important job functions.

As commercial waste solution experts, NWA steps into the gap between the two parties and handles the relationships with the haulers directly, using its wealth of experience to bring best-in-class service.  This brings significant benefits, which we explore below and compare against what you might expect to receive from a national hauler or broker.

1. Consolidated Invoicing
If your business has more than 50 locations, then it can be a significant challenge to control all of the invoices that come from every hauler across the entire portfolio.  Every single invoice needs to be checked for errors or irregularities, and that can be a cumbersome task. 

 NWA consolidates all of your locations and services into one monthly invoice, with single line items for each location and no additional fees or surcharges.  This makes your job much easier and faster, so you can focus on your core business. 

How does this differ from a national hauler or broker?
Some national hauler companies have begun “bundling” their charges and fees together, incorporating all of their costs into one single line item.  While that may sound advantageous, it is simply a method of burying their fees, which leaves you to try to decipher what is the actual charge for service and what has been added as extra fees and surcharges.  You’ll never know the reason the charges are changing.

With a broker, you may struggle to get a consistent handle on your costs on a month-to-month basis.  Some brokers will send a consolidated invoice, which is mostly on a ‘cash basis’, meaning they bill only as they receive invoices from the haulers.  While this may sound acceptable, it often leads to inconsistent bills (i.e.: no charges for a couple of months on locations and then a bill with charges for multiple months).  This makes it difficult for customers to get a consistent handle on their costs from one month to the next.  Brokers also normally are not proactively watching your account or working with the haulers on your behalf.

2. Competitive Procurement for Lower Pricing
With a network of over 3,500 haulers across the length and breadth of the U.S. and Canada, NWA is able to find the best and most cost-effective hauler for each location in your portfolio.

When a new customer is taken on, we go into each marketplace and collect bids from the haulers who are able to meet each location’s service requirements, and negotiate pricing and terms.  Our experts will then compare these service offerings against the location’s unique volumes and material streams, so that the best overall price is achieved.  We will also take into account any seasonal fluctuations in waste volumes that may affect costs, saving you additional money.

The final consideration that we make before selecting the right hauler for the job is whether they offer the best potential for future cost containment and reductions; it’s not always the one with the cheapest initial price.

How does this differ from a national hauler or broker?
By choosing to work directly with a national hauler, you won’t reap the benefits of this competitive bidding process.  While national haulers often come into new contracts offering rock bottom prices, you’ll find that once you’re bound into a contract with them, they will start to gradually increase their prices.  This is commonly referred to in the industry as “price creep” and that can happen multiple times each year.

Brokers will procure your work to haulers, but once they have set up the contracts, they will generally continue to manage them in the state that they receive them, with no optimizations and little cost containment.  In contrast, NWA will complete vital additional work such as frequent waste audits to identify the precise material streams and volumes that each location generates.  With this information, we can reduce the cost of your waste disposal by identifying haulers that can divert materials that would otherwise have gone straight to landfill as generally they have a higher cost versus diverting.

3. Cost Containment at the Core of Your Service
NWA promises an “Upfront Savings Guarantee”, and our entire process is built around providing multiple cost reduction initiatives throughout your contract term.  In most cases, we also offer a price “lock” for the first year of the contract on many services.  

Our Upfront Savings Guarantee ensures that the savings start right out of the gate for your open locations thanks to the fact that we have thousands of active contracts with haulers across the country.  This gives us access to haulers’ wholesale pricing rates, rather than the retail price that you as an individual company would get.  We pass these savings directly onto you and is a fundamental reason why NWA can cut as much as 20% off your current waste and recycling costs.

Throughout the entire contract, our experts make continual service improvements, monitoring volumes and tonnages and optimizing services to ensure that prices are kept down and collection efficiency is kept up.  This process of right-sizing containers and collection frequencies to specific requirements can save an additional 5% or more over the term of the contract.

NWA then dedicates an experienced team to auditing and triple checking all hauler invoices for cost compliance and contesting any increases that are outside of the contract terms.  This activity often results in compounded cost avoidance of thousands of dollars over the course of a contract which, in our experience, can result in an additional savings of 5-7%.  Our dedicated account management team proactively looks for ways to optimize services and divert materials from landfill, and our only “interest” is in reducing costs wherever possible.

How does this differ from a national hauler or broker?
National haulers have a conflict of interest when it comes to optimizing your service to reduce the number of pickups or recommend diverting materials from the landfill.  Since they own the trucks and in most cases the landfills, more pickups and more material going to the landfill means being able to charge you for unnecessary pickups at the higher landfill rate.

While NWA will only pass on “uncontrollable” price increases – like verified landfill, taxes and city charges – other haulers will add internal fees that appear official such as Regulatory Cost Recovery, Fuel Surcharges, Environmental Charges, Admin Fees, Compliance Fees, etc.  These additional charges can put an extra 30% onto your final bill!

You won’t get this level of service from a broker either as they are not actively managing your program.  Once contracts are signed, they’re generally left to run out – even as prices start to tick up for the customer.

4. One Point of Contact
When you’re managing multiple hauler relationships across the country, it can be overwhelming to keep on top of all the communication.  Paperwork builds up, you don’t know who to call when you have an emergency, and no single person is accountable for the quality of service that you receive – apart from you!

NWA provides you with a dedicated account manager who is your single point of contact. They take full responsibility for maintaining high service standards and are on the end of the phone for any requests you or your site managers have.  No more headaches, no more long lists of contact details – just one name, one email and one number.  And we have the resources to back up that account manager, so that your site managers have access to 24/7/365 customer service.

How does this differ from a national hauler or broker?
National haulers and brokers will often not provide access to a single account manager who knows your account inside out.  Instead, they’ll have a call center and whoever picks up the phone is the one to work on your account.  This can lead to reduced accountability and issues being dropped before they have been fully rectified.

5. One Contract, One Expiration Date
When you start working with NWA, we take full responsibility for every relationship with every single hauler that services your sites, and we take full liability for those contracts. 

 We operate as an extension of your corporate office and consider our partnership as fiduciary.  As such, you have one contract with us, and we have contracts with our vendors to which you are not a party to.

With NWA, you get one simple contract to sign, and only one expiration date to remember.

How does this differ from a national hauler or broker?
National haulers will only have one contract to sign, but you will generally find that this document is full of fine print that is unfavorable to you as the customer.  This is so prevalent that several states have begun passing laws for these hauler’s contracts to be written a certain way to help the customer understand the true intentions of the hauler.

There is also a big difference compared to brokers, who require the customer to read each and every hauler contract and sign them all, effectively transferring the liability to you and not the broker.  These contracts are typically overly complicated and are loaded with terms that are rarely in the customer’s best interest like mentioned above.  The number of contracts that you are required to review and sign can be significant, and they often expire on different dates, making it very hard for you to keep track of contract end dates especially if they have auto-renewal clauses with very specific windows to take action.

6. Portfolio-wide Reporting
Because NWA manages all of the waste contracts across your entire portfolio, we can give you a complete picture of your company’s waste and recycling activity and expense reductions, without you having to chase this information down from individual haulers.

We provide you with reports that show company-wide performance data on service provision and group adherence to targets and goals, all of which can be customized to your business’s reporting requirements.

With NWA, you’ll also get access to an online reporting portal, NWA360, where you can see all of this data for yourself, providing you with complete transparency and access to information 24/7, and we have the ability to customize the data to your specific needs.

How does this differ from a national hauler or broker?
Most national haulers may have a portal, which can provide you with basic reports, in their standard template.  In most cases customization is not an option.

Brokers don’t offer online access, as they normally don’t have that much depth or sophistication in their company.

7. Regulatory Compliance and Guidance
Working with NWA doesn’t just save you money.  We can also reduce the resources consumed by your business, and ensure you remain in full compliance with all necessary waste and recycling legislation – whether it’s local, state or federal – so that you never have to worry about it.  And our experts will streamline your waste operations to keep your locations clean, safe, and running efficiently.

We have decades of experience in the waste management industry, making us highly knowledgeable in our field.  We’ll survey your locations for recycling, diversion, repurposing and reuse opportunities that will go beyond what is required of you by the relevant legislation, and then we’ll use our vast network of suppliers to find the top professionals for each aspect of the process.

How does this differ from a national hauler or broker?
Most haulers and brokers operate a more basic compliance service where that compliance is mandatory in the state or town and won’t provide their customers with much additional guidance or consultation.  While NWA has a full-time certified compliance manager who can complete your compliance paperwork on your behalf, you wouldn’t usually be able to expect that level of service from a national hauler or broker.

National haulers aren’t incentivized to find recycling or repurpose opportunities for your material, as they normally own the landfill sites and make their best margins by sending more of your waste straight there.  Meanwhile, brokers leave this activity up to the individual haulers leaving you to devote your resources to actively manage these efforts.

NWA Shines in Challenging Times
During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses had to deal with temporary site closures, alongside huge peaks and valleys in sales volumes – and associated waste production.  As a full service waste management company, with all of the experience and resources at our disposal, NWA was able to act at lightning speed to negotiate voluntary service suspensions and service level alterations so that our customers weren’t caught paying excessive fees when they could least afford them.  Meanwhile our compliance department kept all of our customers up-to-date on the ever-changing legislation, giving our customers complete peace of mind. 

Conclusion
As we stated at the beginning, NWA is a managed services provider that proactively manages your waste and recycling operations on a day-to-day basis, relieving your administrative burden and freeing up you and your team to focus on other more important job functions.

If you are ready to:

• Have a clear and concise consolidated invoice with no hidden fees or surcharges;
• Receive fair-market wholesale pricing based on the actual markets your locations are in and not some standard price list;
• Learn about Guaranteed Upfront Savings with additional savings over the term of the contract;
• Be assigned a dedicated account manager backed by a team who knows you, your location’s contacts and your account;
• Have 24/7 access to your data via our online portal, NWA360; and
• Benefit from an on-staff certified compliance manager who watches local, state and federal regulations to make sure you are completely in compliance …
  

Then National Waste Associates is the perfect fit!

Call us at 888-692-5005 x6 or

email us at sales@nationalwaste.com

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