Trash processing is operated as both a public and private service in metropolitan areas. Public trash service are usually municipal employees who work 9-5, Monday through Friday while private services usually operate late night or early morning. Currently, both public and private trash services use a “route strategy” to go down certain streets to pick up trash, a process used for almost 100 years without modification. With private trash service, if a customer did not pay their bill, the trash service will repossess their trash bin and not return until the account is back in good standing.

If you look at your high-density urban community, you will realize trash processing is something we should be doing to collect revenue to empower ourselves and keep the money invested in the quality of life of our own hoods. You have to realize at this point, every household, every business creates trash and it’s really about who is available to take the trash and dispose of it.  In today society, trash routes are not good enough as more people and business produce more trash on demand due to e-commerce like Amazon with wasteful shipping boxes and packaging producing more volume.

What if you decide you want to take on the trash game in your town by creating a mobile-first service where people can simply request trash pickup over their mobile device or computer and set the trash out when they want to instead of try to fight against the trash pickup schedule of public and private trash firms?  Your service agreement is to pick up the trash as soon as possible for a fee? Let’s look at the overall possibilities through the business model, strategies, challenges and opportunities by taking on the trash collection in our own communities as a mobile-first service.

Private Carter Service

A private carter is the name of an operation that hauls trash from a customer pickup to a waste disposal drop-off point. In some places like New York, this business is heavily regulated while in other areas, it’s a free-for-all Wild West. In most cities, expect regulation due to the fact no city wants garbage trucks all over the streets making noise throughout the night and the risks involved with stop-and-go trucks as a safety issue for workers and pedestrians.

However, your initial goal should be establishing an on-demand private carter where you are not hauling a garbage truck going down each street but to have a pinpoint map where to go pick up a trash and do so in a respectful manner like you are a UPS or FedEx truck.  The strategy to success is to have people look at your business as a “carter service” while everybody is just garbage trucks and junk removal.

What We Discovered in Tokyo

During our trip to Tokyo to discover urban patterns and practices, waste disposal was one of our priorities. The reason is due to the fact I was at a residential place and they handle their trash a lot differently than us. First, they had to buy special colored bags from the store and use separate bags for different type of waste such as paper, plastic and more. Then I saw the trucks were pretty small in size – I realize smaller trucks like these were actually better than the large garbage truck haulers we have back in American inner cities and more cost efficient for a private operator. They are not using trash-bins they are using bags to stuff and not “compacting” the trash which is also a occupational hazard as well.

I realize the hood is missing the major opportunity to condition the local community to buy specialized bags, small trucks to come in and just scoop of the trash and keep it moving like what we saw in Tokyo. The truck is the size of a contractor van and can move more effortlessly through the city.

In America, we have a Non-CDL option (meaning you can just have a driver license, no commercial driver license to drive) where a GMC truck has a Wayne Packer body mounted on the back. However, I do not believe “packing” or compacting the trash need to be done but this is the best we can work with here.  This used 2005 GMC truck was listed on eBay for around $32,000USD which is actually not bad of a price to launch a business operation and is tax depreciable.

Establishing Service in the Hood

It is important to look at your implementation of trash pickup as a “service on demand” to understand the difference between other trash service that operate on 100-year-old paradigms of running street routes. Your business model will be similar to Uber or Lyft where it will be about going to the customer and being positioned around a cluster of customers at a certain time of day.  Here are some things to consider:

Contractor Bags. Just have the customer use contractor bags to fill up their garbage. The bags can be sold in corner stores or ordered online and delivered to their location of service.

QR Code Tags. The purpose of QR code tags is to allow a customer to self-scan the garbage bags they filled up into your tracking system the same way airline baggage check scan a flight tag barcode and wrap it around a suitcase handle.  You provide a quoted price for each scan and the customer accept. The garbage collector come by and scan each tag to see if the bag they collecting is in the system – a charge hold against the payment card happens at this time. Then when the bag reaches your facility and scanned in – you finalize the payment against the customer payment card.

It is important you set rules such as no dead animals or grass clippings must be in a lawn bag. It is advisable to have cameras installed on the collectors picking up the trash as well as emptying the content of a bag to ensure when violations of your collection rules occur, you can fine the customer a penalty fee with proof.

The Secret is the Branding and Perception

If you look at the carter truck in Tokyo versus the garbage trucks we have in the USA, you should see what will make you win at this game. The truck in Tokyo is clean and fits in with the rest of urban traffic while USA garbage trucks are disgusting to look at on the road. You operating a nice clean and small truck with a brand will give a good impression of trash processing the American urban community is not used to seeing before.

We also observed in Tokyo clean-looking garbage trucks with paid advertising on the side – meaning the trucks were carrying paid advertising as revenue and due to their trucks looking clean – advertisers saw it as an opportunity since the trucks are traveling around town along sidewalks filled with people. Definitely look at establishing a clean truck so good looking, you can expand business with advertising on the truck.

We strongly believe people will pay a premium price for your clean truck and on-demand handling of the bags when they want to throw them out. Think of Whole Foods and how expensive the food is but people shop there because they will pay premium for a clean, well-sorted experience.

Areas of Opportunity

Your opportunity will be supplementing single family homes to have an extra service outside of their public trash pickup service. But when it comes to apartment complex and commercial establishments, it may be possible you will convert contracts from larger competitors to your operations. Think about an office business – do they need heavy trash removal service or just a few bags to throw away on demand? Another opportunity is events such as a park where you can sign contracts to pick up the bags and trash at the end of the event.

Trash expenses are a major cost to a business operation and your on-demand trash removal service can fill a serious niche for modern small and medium size businesses who may find your services more flexible than the route-based trash pickup service.

Implementation of Service

You are going to need money and manpower. The realistic way to get this up and running is crowdfunding with refundable pre-deposits. You get enough pre-deposits to get the truck and then pick-up the initial supporters of your business model with you and your family member or lover. But keep in mind you are going to need to also cover insurance, license registration and vehicle storage so factor these costs into your initial crowdfunding. It is very important you sell the importance of your service as a critical foundation of economic activity in the hood to handle trash to keep cost low for startup businesses in your community.

You are going to need a mobile app. This mobile app should allow customers to scan QR codes and track their trash through the waste disposal process and also upload their payment information and view their account with you. Another neat feature is allowing the customer view your truck location so they can be ready when you arrive to have all the bags ready or alert the driver the customer still filling bags and need more time.

For workers – you can hire workers to load the bags and hire former incarcerated brothas and sistas looking for legitimate work to be put on somewhere. Another option is the co-op model where every worker had a stakeholder ownership in the profits of the firm and is an employee-owned company. Use the co-op model only if you intend to stay a local regional service within a given area. If you are looking to expand your service and brands to other communities and cities like a boss and mogul, then you want to focus on employees only.  Only add trucks and employees when your business makes enough money to self-fund the expansion – it is never a great idea to take out a business loan to fund your expansion efforts – just stay within your operating means.

Your pricing is based on a pay-as-you-throw or PAYT model where each scanned QR code is a fee. What you want to do is make an assessment of how many bags you expect to process to determine the price of each bag. Let’s say you charge $2/bag and in a typical hood area – you do 100 to 150 bags a day (this is more than realistic and way more if you do commercial at a higher price than $2/bag)  then we talking $300/day or $1800 a week for 6-day week or $93,000 a year for one truck. That’s decent revenue but we believe we are giving low estimates.

A Great Fundamental Opportunity for the Hood

If you have not realized, creating a small operation carter service in your community will create the foundation for small businesses and households to thrive upon. The community will be clean, commercial businesses can have a waste disposal service they can call when they need it and you will always be in business because trash is always produced. But the best part – if you create clean, branded trucks like they have in Tokyo then you will become one of the best brands in your hood and become a boss in your hood as well. If you look at China, their major bosses are waste management tycoons – that’s going to be you in your hood.

There are way more futuristic opportunities such as scanning the UPC code of stuff found in the trash bags to help identify spending habits and sell that date to big tech. Run more advertisement on your trucks and sell customized garbage bags at a premium price. For commercial establishments with special needs such as cooking oil removal – you can use barrels instead of an oil dump bin to quickly pickup cooking oil.  Apartment complexes will love you because when it comes around Christmas or other holidays when trash get out of control, you can help take the extra waste off their hands with on-demand pre-paid vouchers. You can even sell pre-paid cards for garbage pickup at the corner liquor store in your hood, nothing but opportunities and possibilities.