Running a hotel, pub, restaurant, holiday park, café or visitor attraction comes with enough headaches already.

Your commercial waste collection shouldn’t be another one.

Yet for hospitality and tourism businesses across Norfolk and Suffolk, waste can mean overflowing bins during busy periods, missed collections, mountains of cardboard, rising costs, food waste, complicated recycling requirements and staff wasting time sorting problems that shouldn’t be theirs to solve.

The good news? Better waste management isn’t just about being greener. It can save your business money, time, space and hassle.

Here are five places to start.

1. Check whether you’re paying too much for your commercial waste collections

When did you last properly review your commercial waste contract?

Not just look at the total on the invoice — actually examine what you’re paying for, how many bins you have and how frequently they’re being emptied?

Hospitality businesses change.

A pub gets busier. A hotel adds bedrooms. A holiday park becomes increasingly seasonal. A restaurant changes its opening hours.

Your waste collection schedule should change with you.

You could be paying for collections you don’t need — or constantly dealing with overflowing bins because your current schedule isn’t sufficient.

Marshalls can carry out a free waste audit and price review, looking at your existing arrangements and identifying where things could be improved.

Sometimes the answer isn’t more bins.

It’s using the bins you’ve got more intelligently.

2. Stop throwing valuable cardboard and plastic away

Take a look at what arrives at your business every week.

Food.

Drink.

Cleaning products.

Guest supplies.

Retail stock.

Equipment.

All of that creates packaging — and potentially a lot of cardboard and plastic.

Most businesses automatically see this as something they have to pay to get rid of.

But if you’re producing enough clean cardboard or plastic, there may be another way.

Marshalls can help businesses assess whether a baler could make commercial sense. A baler compresses materials such as cardboard or plastic into compact bales. That can reduce the amount of space the material occupies and, depending on the material, quantity and market, create an opportunity for it to be sold rather than simply disposed of.

Suddenly you’re asking a different question.

Instead of:

“How much is this waste costing us?”

it’s:

“Could this material actually be worth something?”

For larger hotels, holiday parks, attractions and hospitality groups dealing with substantial quantities of incoming packaging, it’s absolutely worth investigating.

3. Make sure your recycling and food waste arrangements are compliant

Commercial recycling rules in England have changed.

Under Simpler Recycling, workplaces need to separate key recyclable waste streams, including food waste and dry recyclable materials such as paper, card, glass, metal and plastic.

That makes having the right commercial waste and recycling arrangements increasingly important for hospitality businesses.

And hospitality can be complicated.

A hotel might be dealing with:

• Food waste

• Glass

• Cardboard

• Plastic packaging

• General waste

• Bathroom waste

• Waste from guest bedrooms

• Waste from bars and restaurants

The answer isn’t necessarily to fill your back yard with every type of bin imaginable.

It’s to understand what waste your particular business produces and create a practical system around it.

Marshalls can review your current setup and help identify the collections and containers your business actually needs.

4. Build your waste collections around your busy periods

Anyone working in the Norfolk and Suffolk visitor economy knows that demand isn’t consistent throughout the year.

A coastal pub in August isn’t the same business it is on a Tuesday in February.

Hotels fill up.

Wedding venues enter peak season.

Holiday parks become packed.

Restaurants get busier.

Visitor attractions suddenly have hundreds or thousands more people coming through their doors.

And all those extra customers create extra waste.

Your commercial waste service needs to reflect that reality.

Rather than automatically accepting the same arrangement throughout the year, look at when your waste volumes rise and fall.

Are you paying for unnecessary capacity during quieter periods?

Do you need additional collections during peak season?

Could changing collection frequency prevent overflowing bins when you’re busiest?

Waste management should work around your hospitality business — not the other way around.

5. Calculate what waste problems are costing you in staff time

This is the cost businesses often forget.

A collection is missed.

Someone notices the bins are full.

They tell a manager.

The manager finds the account details.

Someone phones the waste company.

They’re put through to someone else.

They send an email.

They chase again.

Meanwhile, that person is being paid to deal with a bin rather than your customers.

The cost of poor waste management isn’t only what’s written on your invoice.

It’s time, disruption and headaches.

And when you’ve got guests arriving, a restaurant full of customers or a wedding taking place, the last thing you need is an overflowing waste area becoming another operational problem.

That’s why being local and responsive matters to us.

Marshalls is an independent East Anglian business. We want our customers to know who they’re dealing with and have someone to contact when they need help.

We’ll worry about your waste, so you don’t have to.

Could your hospitality business save money on waste?

At Marshalls, our aim isn’t simply to sell more bins.

We want to help hospitality and tourism businesses across Norfolk and Suffolk become more sustainable while saving money, time and headaches.

That could mean:

• Reducing unnecessary commercial waste collections

• Improving your recycling

• Reviewing your food waste arrangements

• Changing bin sizes or collection frequencies

• Helping you manage seasonal increases in waste

• Finding better ways to deal with cardboard and plastic

• Exploring whether valuable recyclable material could generate an income

• Making the whole process easier for your team

And the starting point is simple.

Book a free commercial waste audit and price review

We’ll look at what your business currently has, what you’re paying and how your waste is being managed.

If you run a hotel, pub, restaurant, café, holiday park, wedding venue, visitor attraction or leisure business in Norfolk or Suffolk, talk to Marshalls about a free waste audit and price review.

Because your customers should be enjoying your business.

You shouldn’t be worrying about its bins.