We recently hire a new waste hauler who uses scaled front loader trucks to collect our waste & recyclables. Our numbers are slowly creeping towards the 50%, but we want to include the shredded/sensitive paper amounts of each of our tenants as this would improve our number significantly. Are we allowed to estimate based on bin gallon size the amount of weight and frequency of pick ups and possibly use a 75% fill rate to be conservative and add to our recyclables weight to improve our score? We are a multi-tenant building and not all senstive paper collection providers weigh their bins upon pick up and nor would we be able to enforce our tenants to give us weights or % filled up each pick up. Thanks in advance.
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Dan Ackerstein
PrincipalAckerstein Sustainability, LLC
LEEDuser Expert
819 thumbs up
March 14, 2011 - 12:29 pm
That's a tough one Paul - in general the rule is that either weight or volume needs to be measured, particularly because basing your calculations on an assumed fill rate won't allow for useful tracking if/when your program improves or decreases performance (for the shredded paper). I wonder if there is any way to have the hauler perform even a very rough measurement of fullness when they collect? Either a visual check or, if they can't open the bins, some kind of measurement using a yardstick slid into the drop-slot on the top? Short of that, I think the next best thing would be using an assumed fill rate, but one that is generated by actual measurements from a sampling of bins. I have a project that estimated bag weight in this fashion - rather than weighing every bag, they weighed a sample of bags x times per week to produce a multiplier. They updated that multiplier every month to ensure it was reflecting changes in their program. An imperfect solution, but better than pretending that no shredded paper is being diverted! Hope this helps a little.
Dan