How Waste Disposal & Transportation Companies Can Find Waste Generators

The waste industry is growing fast, and forecast to grow faster in the future. There are huge opportunities nationwide as waste management regulations get tighter and the quantity of waste produced rises.

Insights gives waste transporters and disposal facilities access to a huge, searchable and up-to-date database of waste generators, and lets you match up generators in your area or your waste specialty with other providers.

In this post, we’ll go over how the waste industry is changing, and then demonstrate how to use Insights to track down the right companies to fuel your own growth.

Opportunity to waste

Waste is a major growth industry, accelerated by two factors. First, even when populations remain flat, waste doesn’t disappear, and economic growth means more products — which means more packaging, more old products; more waste.

And second, government is getting serious about cleaning it up. It’s not just about Superfund sites, or shocking finds of toxic waste off the coast. Government around the world, including in the US, is moving towards a ‘circular economy’ approach to waste, aimed at minimizing landfill and maximizing recycling and the integration of waste streams and supply chains.

Both of these factors mean more waste than ever before is being moved to specialized facilities, and treated like a resource rather than something to be thrown away with as little effort as possible.

Rich countries’ per-capita waste output is expected to increase by 19% between now and 2050, a slower rate than middle- and low-income countries, but still an increase of just under 100 million metric tonnes per year.

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However, it’s not just that the quantity of waste will increase.

The value of waste is increasing too.

Here’s per-capita solid waste in the USA:

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You can see it climb sharply from 1960 to 1990 as the economy grew, then start to level off and fall as we got better at recycling. Comparing 2000 and 2017, waste production fell. But revenues in the waste industry don’t track that trend:

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Waste production per capita in 2017 was 95% of its 2000 level; waste industry revenue was 160% of its 2000 level (figures from the charts above). And as waste production starts to rise again, and new environmental laws are passed by cities and states nationwide — and considered by the federal government too — that trend can be expected to accelerate.

There’s a huge business opportunity in the waste industry, but it won’t come just from expanding the business you’re already getting from existing customers. As waste production and profitability rises it will also change — an even longer-term trend. Municipal solid waste landfill sites have declined rapidly in the US since 1990:

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Centralization and specialization put disposal, not at the town open dump, but at specific locations at the end of a transportation net. Waste generators are responsible for their waste, but they’re seldom equipped to deal with all of it themselves.

How do waste transporters and disposal companies find generators so they can transport and process their waste?

WasteBits Insights is a tool for identifying waste generators, transporters and disposal facilities, with information on waste quantity, manifest numbers, locations, and contact information for decision-makers. It’s searchable by parameters including location, waste codes, and much more. It’s the industry’s most up-to-date source of lead data. Here’s how to use it.

Find waste generators by location

We’ll start with the Generators report in Insights:

I have several location options. I can drop a target zip code in the first search box, and add a radius:

That brings up generators under those parameters. For instance, this is what I get when I use the zip code 10112, and a 5-mile radius:

No big surprise, waste generators in Hoboken, New Jersey and similar locations make the list. However, this list is still a little unwieldy; I get 635 results. I’m going to need another criterion to cross-reference against. (We’ll look into that further down.)

Or I can use the State dropdown. Here, I’ve gone for New York, with no other search parameters apart from a two-month window for shipping dates.

These results are much wider — of course, New York State is a bit dominated by New York City, so there’s a lot of Brooklyn- and Bronx-based facilities in this list; but there are some farther afield, like Pen Yann and Fort Edward.

Another option is to use state-level waste codes. Say I use state waste code B005, ‘PCB articles other than transformers, that contain 500ppm [parts per million] or greater of PCBs, excluding small capacitors.’ That’s a New York-only waste code that doesn’t apply outside New York State.

These are my results:

Although I’m really using this as an off-label geographic search, I get some insight into the types of waste these generators produce. More to the point of my search, they’re all in New York.

Find waste generators by waste type

Which brings us to finding waste generators by the type of waste they produce. This is obviously crucial for waste transporters and disposal facilities alike, since strict regulations govern storage, transport and disposal.

Insights makes this easy too.

There’s the Federal Waste Code dropdown menu:

This 568-item dropdown lists federal waste codes for every type of waste covered by federal regulation.

If you know the code, you can search by code.

If you don’t know the code, but you do know the waste type, you can search verbally too:

If we just use this parameter, K147 — ‘tar storage residues from coal tar refining’ — here’s what we get:

You can also search for more than one federal code; if I also add K141 — ‘process residues from the recovery of coal tar, including but not limited to, tar collecting sumps’ — the results I get show generators that produce both types of waste, not either type.

That’s crucial: you can use multiple waste codes to narrow down your search results to just the companies that produce only the broad types of waste you’re looking for. In this case, I’m getting companies that produce two related types of waste; I can use this search type off-label too, to zero in on waste generators that match my disposal or transportation criteria.

Find waste generators by size and company type

You can search by company size and company type as well. There’s a Fed Waste Generator code dropdown:

It’s most useful when you use it in conjunction with other search parameters. If you use it on its own, you get too many results to be useful:

This search returned over 24,000 results from all across the country.

You can use it alongside the NAICS (North American Industry Classification System) code:

If you don’t know the NAICS code for the kind of business you’re looking for, you can search the NAICS website or search the Insights NAICS dropdown verbally:

As with most Insights dropdowns you can select multiple NAICS codes. Again, choosing multiple options returns results that match both criteria, not either. Here’s what I get when I use just the Large Quantity Waste Generator federal code and NAICS code 11192 — ‘cotton farming.’

When I add NAICS code 115111, ‘cotton ginning,’ to the list, I get these results:

(Nothing!)

You can use multiple NAICS to narrow down your search, but it’s more effective in most cases to narrow it down in other ways.

One is to use just NAICS codes, and then match waste quantity produced to your ICP (ideal customer profile).

So here, I’ve removed the Large Quantity Waste Generator federal code and NAICS code 115111. These results aren’t narrowed down by location either.

(Unsurprisingly, none of these is in New York…)

Down the right-hand side of these search results, you can see number of manifests and tons of the specified waste type shipped. Again, this is within two months, so Clean Harbors Arizona LLC is moving a lot of cotton farming waste!

This lets you identify companies that produce the specified waste type regularly, or frequently, or in large amounts, or all of the above, and you can see those numbers at a glance right in the search results. Search results are ranked by tons of waste from highest to lowest, so you can move down through search results until you start to see companies whose tonnage meets your ICP requirements.

Match generators and facilities with Insights

If you’re a waste transporter, you can identify both generators and facilities that deal in the same waste types. Starting in the Generators report, I’ll use the same search parameters to get a report on Facilities too. I’m searching for NAICS 213112, ‘support activities for oil and gas operations.’

All I had to do was click Facilities in the top left corner. The same search is automatically performed, but for facilities.

Normally when you search for facilities you’ll get far fewer results than for generators, for obvious reasons.

Now I can alternate between these two reports, narrowing both down by other parameters until I have a match between generators and facilities.

For instance, if I search in Arizona for the same NAICS, I get these two generators:

Check the same search parameters for Facilities and I can see my only option in Arizona is Clean Harbors:

But they’re disposing of less waste than they produce; I need a disposal facility that I can match with a producer, so I need to look out of state. I can look in neighboring states, like New Mexico and California:

(Like other menus in Insights, I can select more than one state.)

Match generators and transporters with Insights

If you’re a disposal facility and you want to match generators and transporters to bring waste to you, you can use a similar process.

Start with the Generators report. I’ll use the same parameters as before:

But now I’ll open the Transporters report for the same query:

This isn’t very useful. Suppose I’m a waste disposal facility — say, Veolia ES Technical Solutions, in neighboring California. I can look for California-based transporters, by choosing CA from the State dropdown:

Looks like West Coast Environmental Solutions might be a good partner.

Contacting waste generators

Insights makes contacting waste generators simple. Once you’ve matched generators to your ICP and you know which ones you want to contact, you’ll want the contact information for the decision-maker at that company who deals with either transporters or disposal facilities.

Finding that is easy.

In Insights search results, just click on a generator — in this case, New West Oil Company:

At the top of the page, you get the company’s handler ID, location and mailing address, and full contact information for the company’s decision-maker.

Takeaways

Waste is a burgeoning industry, filled with opportunities. Insights makes it easy to find and contact the right businesses to take advantage of those opportunities. It’s the most up-to-date and comprehensive database in the industry, and it’s easy to search with common sense and industry-standard search parameters. When you find a company that you think it would make sense to work with, contact details for the right person are a click away. You can try a limited version of Insights free, but for the full feature set check out plans and pricing.