Waste is the invoice nobody in your organisation truly owns. It arrives monthly, it climbs silently, and questioning it means arguing with a national collector about levies, increased rates and contract clauses written by their lawyers — exit terms, notice windows, price-rise mechanisms and liability, refined over years and tested against thousands of customers before you ever signed.
There is nothing sinister in that — every supplier's standard terms are drafted by its own legal team to protect its own interests, as you'd expect. But it means the agreement was written by professionals on one side and signed by a busy person on the other. Those terms decide what you can question, when you can leave, and what a price rise is allowed to look like — and they were never negotiated, because nobody was negotiating for you.
The collector is paid per lift. You are paid nothing for noticing the bins were half empty.
So most sites carry some combination of: lock-in terms that outlast the price being fair, ratchet increases compounding well above CPI, and service schedules sized for a busier site than yours.
None of it is illegal. All of it is negotiable — it just relies on you knowing what we know: what the market actually pays, and what the paperwork actually says.